Last Wednesday I woke up to a pleasant, yet cold, surprise. It was snowing! And not the weak little snow we sometimes see in Holland, no this was heavy snow, the way it was intended. So I quickly rushed my morning preparations and blog post to go out and snap some pictures before I had to go to school. As Tokyo is obviously an urban area, it is usually a bit to warm at ground level to allow snow to remain snow. Besides that, the snow turned into rain while I was in school, so after school the small bits of snow that were there earlier, had been flushed away. Fortunately, I still managed to find some nice spots to shoot while the snow was still tumbling down ever so gently.

The rest of the week was pretty quiet, although I did go for Ramen with two of my classmates. We went to a Korean ramen shop in Harajuku, the shopping area. The ramen was excellent and I got to do some window shopping. Soon I’m gonna have to try and find some awesome shoes in my size there!

Friday, however, it was time for Japans favorite pastime; karaoke! Michel and I invited all our fellow residents to come along, but in the end only Swaroop had time to join us. Fortunately Michel had invited a bunch of other people as well, including Artem, so we ended up renting our very own karaoke room with 12 people from all over the globe. We had some Japanese, American, Swedish and Canadian, am I forgetting anybody? Oh, and of course one from Holland (me, for the less perceptive).

I must admit, I was a bit anxious at first. It isn’t every day a guy from Holland has to sing badly into a microphone in front of a group of people. But fortunately the anxiety quickly faded, when I noticed singing well is not necessary when fooling around in a karaoke booth! Oh, and the beers, vodka and whiskey we brought along may have helped as well.

Anyway, karaoke is awesome! Everybody was having loads of fun picking their favorite songs, waiting for it excitedly and than of course singing it with all your heart and soul poured into it, or something like that. Though Michel and I were a bit afraid at first the Japanese would hog the microphone all evening, it turned out we (and Artem) were the ones doing that!

My Japanese class on Friday must’ve been destiny by the way, because that day we practiced a famous Japanese song: Ue no muite arukoo, or, I look up when I walk. So of course I had to (try and) sing it at karaoke. And guess what, aside from some words that were written in kanji I didn’t remember, it went pretty ok, although the karaoke version was a bit faster than we sang it in class and I of course can’t really sing.

So, for everybody’s enjoyment I present to you Rob singing Ue no muite arukoo… I am so gonna regret this…

Still able to read? Good, because after karaoke the night wasn’t finished of course. Everybody was pretty wasted, so it was time to go to the club. Which club? You guessed it, atom! So yes, I had to promise not to take any pictures inside again, so no party pictures from the inside. I did however take some pictures on our way to the club.

Inside atom they had a Jägermeister special thingy going on, so we ended up slamming Jäger shooters and drink way too much altogether. Swaroop and his friend had decided we had to do some dares. Swaroop had to kiss a guy, the poor guy never knew what hit him, I had to hit on a typical Japanese party girl, and failed miserably at the attempt, but the dare was won, and his friend had to get a group of people to dance with her, although she claimed otherwise, she didn’t succeed.

After goofing around a bit more inside the club, I ended up loosing sight of everybody and eventually went home by myself. Luckily, the metros were already running, so I didn’t have to take a cab on my own. In the metro I ended up talking to some Japanese guys and, although I can’t really remember what we talked about, it was in Japanese(ish). After transferring to my final metro, I got really freaked out by the person sleeping in front of me, what about you?

Tags: karaoke, snow

This entry was posted on Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 4:57 pm and is filed under Japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.