Reunited in Shibuya!

It's been a long time coming, but a few of us who participated in Nogyaru rice harvesting decided to meet up for a girl's day out in Shibuya! Naturally the entire event turned into a huge photo session for everyone, so I managed to take quite a few photos. It was all brought together by Maki, so I'm so grateful to her that I got to see everyone again.

Maki managed to reserve us our own snug little corner in a restaurant called PUBLIC HOUSE. Once everyone who could come was assembled, we started off with brunch!

Mayu and I got this hamburg dish. Unfortunately I wasn't able to finish it. There was just way too much food!

Everyone else got this spaghetti dish. I kinda wish I had gotten it too considering it looks delicious even now!

The desert. I was a bit too full to get one myself though.

A picture I managed to snap of Mei and Nami during our conversing. We talked about a lot of things, from differences between America and Japan, to job searching, to dieting and exercise, and naturally a lot more topics came up. I managed to learn a few new words too!

All of us assembled. From left to right: Me, Mayu, Maki, Nami, and Mei.

On our way out of the restaurant.

Some of the graffiti that can be found around Shibuya.

An advertisement for EXILE's new album. I tripped on the sidewalk and twisted my ankle shortly after this shot. Unfortunately it still hurts a bit now.

 View of Shibuya as we crossed an overhead walkway.

Advertisement for the new Dissidia game that came out. 

Art meets Mode advertisement.

Naturally, the next place we went was an arcade so we could take purikura!

A couple of the purikura machines. There were so many that it was hard to choose which machine to use!

A sign advertising their stamp card services.

After we chose a random one, the purikura machine gave us this pack of eyelashes as a gift. No one really wanted them, so I ended up taking them.

 Deciding how to divide up the purikura...

Which turns into an opportunity for a silly photo!

The purikura we took together.

After purikura, we decided to head into the next building over for some karaoke.

We got the party room! Which was a bit unfortunate for me since we sat all the way in the back. I had some trouble reading some the lyrics because they were blurry for me without my glasses.

Everyone wanted to hear me sing in English, so I kicked our karaoke session off with Bad Romance.

Other songs we sung were AKB48's Heavy Rotation and the classic Stay Away by L'Arc~en~Ciel. Surprisingly, Shoujo Jidai and KARA songs were also sung (in their Japanese versions, of course).

After our hour and a half of fun we all headed our separate ways. However we did leave with plans to meet up again next day to do cherry blossom viewing. I'm really looking forward to it!

Farewell~

So last night was the farewell party for Nicole since she's going back to America. Unfortunately, we got there really really late (like a half hour late x.X) but she still met up with us at the station so we could find the gyuudon place that we ate at before. I got the same Tokyo gyuudon as I ordered before the last time we went to Ueno. After we ate, we headed over to a bar that Brian recommended to Nicole where we all decided to get the free drinks for an hour and a half plan. Once we got to our room, I ended up ordering ramune sour. It's amazing that they make such a thing, and it was good too. Plus it had a lot more alcohol than that Tropical Sunrise did at Watami! I was surprised. I must have had four or five of them by the time our hour and a half was up.

Japanese karaoke works a bit differently than it does in America. For one thing, we're in our own private room so it's only our party, as you can see in the picture above.

We use this little device to find and select the song(s) we want to seen. There's two of them, so other people are putting in their songs to the queue at the same time. You can see my ramune sour on the right there. 8D

One of the girls who had been on exchange last year at my school in Massachusetts took this for us :)

The first song that I sung was Inside Fishbowl by Koda Kumi, and I think it really surprised everyone since they weren't expecting me to be able to speak any Japanese, let alone sing a Japanese song. They were telling me how good my pronunciation was, which was nice~ I also sung Want Me Want Me by Amuro Namie, which received some amusing actions from everyone who hadn't heard the song before.


After our hour and a half was up, we went downstairs and started chatting for a bit, trying to figure out what to do next. We ended up going upstairs for some more karaoke. However, all of the native Japanese speakers took off and it was Nicole, one of her friends, and us.

I ended up singing a bunch of songs, including Heavy Rotation by AKB48, which is amazing since I've never even heard the song in full before! Unfortunately our time was eventually up, and we headed home.

But first I took this picture of this bowl with magical chopsticks that fly up and down.

We said our goodbyes at the train station. I'm going to miss Nicole. She was sooooo helpful to us and I'm so thankful to her! ;w;