- party time: part 3 -

16 february - class party @ izakaya Sou-Ya, near the university. unfortunately no pictures for this, otherwise i would've looked like a total idiot taking pictures of food with my mobile in front of 24 classmates - 20 Japanese, 2 foreigners, a PR and a Japanese-Korean half. i thought the party would be mainly a drinking and bonding session, so i half-filled my stomach with some tofu and meat before leaving for Oookayama.

but it turned out to be another 5-course (or was it 7?) meal party.

damn.

we toasted with beers and cocktails. the opening speech was given by a guy who claimed that he will remain as an ichinensei (first-year) next term. maybe he doesn't have enough credits to go to 2nd year, or maybe he's just dissatisfied with his current results (like another classmate of mine, who gave up promotion to year-2 because he thinks that he'll "only" get a 85% average for his overall results). anyhow, everyone laughed at him when he gave his speech, apart from a few who weren't that enthusiastic at that time, me being one of them since i'm not entirely sure if i can move on to the 2nd year. it all depends on the science subjects, yep.

the first plate was filled with sashimi - RAW. yeah baby, i love raw fish (and raw eggs).. correction: FRESH raw fish and eggs. although, i could only recognize sake (salmon), maguro (tuna), tako (octopus) and ebi (shrimp).. the raw smell of fish was properly removed, and they weren't that hard to chew. maybe i'm used to sashimi, i don't know.

next, fried stuff - crispy french fries, deep-fried oysters, and deep-fried minced pork. we were quietly eating when the other table (we were separated into 2 long-tables in a special room because there were too many of us) suddenly started the jikoshoukai game. it sounds kinda dumb to introduce yourself a year after studying in the same class, but the main purpose of the game was to make everyone (at their table) drink after the self-introduction. beer, of course.

"i want to major in the civil engineering department! this is the proof!" and he'd drink an entire glass of beer without stopping halfway. bfft.. well this is Japanese culture, some alcohol amateurs die of this, but they still do the ikkinomi thing. then it escalated from a glass to 2 glasses, and finally when it came to our PR classmate, he chugged an entire bottle of beer in one go. way to go, northeastern Chinese (he's from Beijing), they can drink a lot. in fact, he had more bottles but didn't get drunk at all. but girls were strong too - one of the nomikai-pro girls drank straight from a bottle as well, towards the end of the party.

later, we had kimchi nabe and porridge - pork, tofu and vegetables in boiling kimchi soup, and when it's almost finished, the waiter poured rice and beat eggs into the pot. we struggled to make space in our tummies for the porridge, while the other table just made a lot of noise.. usually it's fine to be boisterous in an izakaya especially if it's a party, but we were warned by the waiters because we exceeded the noise limit (quote a friend who's working as a waiter there, "chotto, urusaikedo..") - come to think of it, the neighbouring room was much quieter than ours, even though there were chatters and laughs.

that was awkwardly strange. would've pulled a "huh?" face at the waiters if we were all gaijins. i know we gaijins are equally loud even when we're not having parties. =p

2 hours passed very quickly. our class representative came 3 minutes before the party ended and he could only drink 2 bottles of beer. but he had to pay the full-course 3,260 yen too. poor thing.. and then, most of them made their way to another round of nomikai, but 5 of us retired. i claimed that i had to make it back for my curfew, but in my heart i didn't care about that actually - i just didn't want to have anymore beer. it suffocates me..