Adventures in Japan

The scariest was the man dressed as an exotic dancer

Saturday night we went to a Halloween party at the Green Leaf (a bar near here I think we've mentioned before). They had a real live DJ, so we weren't listening to CDs from beginning to end like we usually do when we're there, but it was very, very loud. And crowded. We weren't in costume, but we still had a pretty good time. Afterwards, we heard that there was a train party going on that night. I'm not sure what it was actually called, so I'm going to call it a "train party" because what happened was people in costume all got on the same train and rode it round and round Osaka all night. Interesting, but probably not for me. What with the motion sickness and all.

I didn't think Halloween was all that big in Japan, but some people do dress up and have parties & stuff, but there's no trick-or-treating. "If the Japanese aren't into trick-or-treating, how will Carla and Tyler manage to get their hands on bags of tiny, individually wrapped chocolate bars?" you may ask. Well you needn't worry. Nearly everything you can buy in a bag here comes individually wrapped. Especially cookies. Tiny cookies.

Bright and early this morning we dragged our butts to the 6th Annual Interpeople Quiz Rally. We were both feeling incredibly sleep-deprived, but we'd signed up for this thing not long after we got here. It would have been really rude to just not show up. And hey, free shirts. Sweatshirts, even. Unfortunately, the day was warm and somewhat humid, so wearing sweatshirts made us feel kind of ill. But we had to wear them so people could tell at a glance what teams we belonged to. I was on the green team. Tyler was grey. Each team was broken down into sub-groups of nine. Everyone in my group spoke at least a little English. Some were fluent. Tyler's team, not so much. I don't think anyone on his team spoke English very well. Poor guy.

Once we'd all been divided into teams, we all assembled for the opening ceremonies, which included calisthenics. Just like in Animal Crossing (a super-cute Nintendo game where all your neighbours are animals). It was kind of surreal. Then we had a series of races where we had to waddle along with all our feet tied together on giant skis. I didn't see what that had to do with quizzes. I guess that was the rally part. We also had to build towers out of beer cans, and race back and forth to fill a bottle of water with a tiny cup. Then there was the quiz part. We walked around the park stopping at checkpoints to answer questions. Surprisingly enough, a lot of the questions were in Japanese. Even once someone would translate a question into English for me, I still wouldn't know the answer. Oh well. At least I got a free shirt. And a couple of other small prizes because the green team came in second. Each one was individually wrapped.

We went a little overboard buying snacks at 7-11 tonight. But we can report that Caesar Salad chips taste mostly like Sour Cream & Onion, Carbonara chips aren't particularly good, and Honey Butter Pretz are horribly addictive. We also tried mochi for the first time. It's a sweet rice cake popular in the fall and winter. Very yummy, even though we bought it from 7-11.