On Friday night, some friends and I got together for a little bit of drinking, and some public humiliation. Stan was supposed to ask this girl out by Friday, and since he didn’t, he had to be publicly humiliated.
At any rate, the point of all this is that while there, we played on David’s Playstation 3, for which he paid about $650 US. I think that’s a little much for a game console, but it is not without merit. Amazing graphics.
While there, I met this Guatemalan man and his girlfriend. He was a philosophical drunk, and he was trying to tell me about love. “I’m going to marry this girl,” he said, putting his arm around her and pointing. “Except, she has an artificial heart and cannot love anyone.” He kept asking me to speak to him in Spanish, but my Spanish was never that advanced to begin with, and so we ended up speaking this confusing melange of Spanish, Japanese and English. Every couple of minutes he would turn to her and make out for about 30 seconds and then turn back to me to continue talking. Maybe it’s a Guatemalan thing?
Earlier in the week, we had our kanji midterm, and I’m pretty sure I got an A, but I think they had mercy for us and made the test easier than they had to. I was more than a little nervous going into it, and the thing that troubled me the most on the exam was the pronunciation of the kanji. Glad to have that done with, and it was my only midterm. It’s weird to be only half-done with the semester when stateside people are starting finals.
On Saturday we went to a nomihodai place (one of my favorites because they serve a bunch of food and the drinks are pretty decent), and I tried umeshyu (I’m uncertain how to spell is in romaji - 梅酒), but it translates to plum alcohol or plum wine. It’s very very sweet, and though I do not enjoy a plum, this was amazing. I’m not sure about its availability in the States, but if you get a chance, try it.
Grace a Yamaya (which could literally be translated as mountain store) - a store that specializes in alcohol and imported foods, we found cachaça (fermented sugar cane). Alan tells me that it’s the favorite drink of Brazil, and this particular bottle we bought was actually a Brazilian brand. Most of the people here who are even remotely social drink quite a bit, and so I’m hoping to host a cachaça night so we can socialize and discover Brazil’s culture through alcohol. The only problem is, we can’t find limes, which you need to make caipirinha (why we wanted the cachaça).
Drinking isn’t all I do here - there just happened to be two parties this weekend. And, don’t worry mom - we’re all responsible adults and take care of each other. Smokey the bear says, “Friends don’t let friends bike home drunk.”