Hell of an Awesome weekend

Friday:

Got invited to a friend's performance at country pub and hung out listening to him and a guitarist perform a bunch of old songs from the Eagles, Beatles etc etc. I called out a few friends to come out and join for the evening. Had a few beers, nachos and good coversation. What else could I want?

After the performance was done we headed outside to visit a baloon artist my friend, Kayo, knew. I got an Elmo made and we hung out with the other street artists for the evening. I ended up buying a book of poems from a nice guy that's got some disease (unforutnately I couldn't make out what), so he spends most of the week at home in bed and only comes out for the weekends. During the weekdays, he spends his time thinking and writing from bed. He writes 3 kinds of poems, encouragement (green), caution (yellow) and warnings (red). I'll be looking forward to reading them soon.

I headed out to grab a few more drinks with Kayo to warm up from after hanging out outside for so long. It is still *cold* in Sendai, even though it's about 500 km south of Vancouver. Doesn't make sense but we had snow on April 1st (and no, that isn't a joke!). My Japanese friends laughed that Vancouver is having the cherry blossoms bloom several weeks in advance compared to Sendai (nothing's started budding yet!). Crazy eh?

Well the good thing was that we found an all you can drink bar for only 6 bucks. We did have to order some food however (well just one order and it wasn't expensive anyways) and ended the evening at 2:00 am before parting ways. A good evening was had.

Saturday -- House warming

We held the house warming party about 3 weeks after moving in. We finished settling in after about 2 weeks and we spent the rest of the time trying to figure out when we'd be able to do house warming. It is tough trying to coordinate the schedules of 3 busy people!

So, we finally pulled it off about last weekend. We decided that we'd call up 5 friends each and invtie them over and have a potluck party (I ended up calling up 7.. but that's a different story :P). A good time was had and we did have the chance to meet each other's respective friends.

We started at about 8:00 pm, Kuni was off at his friend's place with his bunch of friends cooking food. I was at the home cooking with my friends... and Olympia? Well... she had work that evening and couldn't do any cooking. There was the "Chili incident" but that (again) is another story :P.

The other plus about having the party was that it gave me the right excuse to do some more cleaning in my room to have it fit for people to crash... and crash they did!

The food!

I decided on making mashed potatoes, fried spaghetti, spinach salmon salad and mango pudding for dessert. Kuni brought in tempura and stuffed peppers. The rest of the friends brought drinks, beer and etc.

A few pictures below :)

Me, Tetsuya and Youn ji

People crashing on my bed!

Friends making friends (cell number exchange!)

The party lasted until about 2:00 am. I really hope we didn't piss off our neighbours. It'd be kind of ironic to get complaints to get kicked out from the house warming party... but it seemed that things were pretty allright. I should have taken a picture of all the shoes at the entrance since they were all over the place, but I was too busy having a good time :).

The next day was Kuni's b-day... and we went motorcycle touring with friends the next day in the morning. Bikeless people would go by car as we headed out to the ocean to the fish market to get ingredients for his B-day BBQ (try and say that fast 3 times over).

I'll save the rest of that story for my next post. As much as I would like to spend more time writing up these posts, I'm still at lab and got work to do unforutnately, so that'll have to wait until next time. Going to get hooked up into an optical fiber network (ie. Internet on crack!) on the 16th. I'll be pretty happy when that happens.

Cheerio!