Japan - Days 28-30

The last couple of days have been great :-D
As Thursday was the autumnal equinox (a national holiday in Japan), we had another day off, so a few of us went to Iias (the big mall) after having lunch at Starbucks. I finally got a green tea frappucino, which tasted sooo good ^^ As it was raining, we didn't bike it as we'd originally intended; we took the bus and then the train. Once there, we explored a little more, one of my friends bought a key chain, and then we went and had something else to eat at McDonalds - as I was using their Wi-Fi to get Victini, I bought something despite not being too hungry, but it was only 100 yen so it wasn't too bad ^^ Then we decided to go back as we were a little bored, but we agreed to meet up in the afternoon for gyoza (meat dumplings)
So after calling around and inviting Jen and a friend of my other friends, we met up and walked in the rain to a gyoza restaurant about 5 minutes away, through the back streets of Tsukuba which I haven't gotten around to exploring yet. It's a little place, but luckily the 5 of us got an authentic sit-on-the-tatami-mat table, and had 10 gyoza each. One of the other guys said 15 would make a guy feel very full, but after 10, I was barely full, so I beg to differ. I guess we'll see sometime XD It was tasty though. After this, we headed back to collect our bikes and headed home. I did notice a karaoke place near the gyoza restaurant though, so that's something for me to bear in mind when my birthday comes around ^^
Friday I was back in the lab. Finished off an entire PCR and gel in the morning, which failed for some unknown reason. Previously my problem was streaks in the lanes - this time there was nothing. Japanese class wasn't bad - we just worked on a few more drills, asking about lost items. In the afternoon, I started practicing cutting the tips off of mice's tails for genotyping. The tail-cutting was alright, but when I had to pick one up by the scruff of the neck, I couldn't grip it right. One jumped right out of my hand :-O) and then when I'd set it up, it would have taken until 9 for the gel to be complete, but luckily my supervisor OKed me going home and then coming in on Saturday morning, so I headed back and got some dinner About 7ish, I got a call from one of my friends asking if I wanted to meet up with some of the others for a while. I said sure, and went and sat with them for a bit, before we went down to meet up with some other people in front of the combini. From there, we went to get some cheap drinks from the 100 yen store, before heading back to the dorms and chilling for a bit. When one of our group left, we went and got another drink before heading to a bar a few blocks away. It was open mic night so a couple of people were singing, but it's a small place. Nice though ^^ A bit later we went back to the dorm and met up with a bunch of other slightly drunken people, before returning to the combini, getting another drink, and returning to the bar, where we spent the remainder of the evening Now, I've only been drunk twice before, so this is still pretty new to me, but it was very fun :-) I didn't really do much, but it's so weird how your senses get all furry and such. There's about an hour which I have NO recollection of, but my friends say I didn't do anything dumb in that time, thankfully XD We stayed until about 5am, before cycling back home with the sun rising around us ^^' I promptly fell asleep XD About 2 and a half hours later, I woke up again to go to the lab. I finished up my experiment (which still failed), and bought a can of strong coffee while it was running. Then I came back home, went online for a few minutes, then attempted to sleep, but couldn't on account of the caffeine. Just before I was meant to be getting up, I had a phone call from the delivery person so I had to go let them in. A few minutes after that, I texted my friends to meet up for lunch, and biked my way over to them
As I hadn't eaten since my early dinner the night before, I was ravenous, and ordered a large curry udon bowl. When they said large, they meant it - I struggled a little, but in the end I pushed through and ate it all, and it was delicious :-D The original plan had been to cycle down to WonderGOO, but as everyone was either tired or busy, we decided to postpone until tomorrow, despite the fact that it had become a rather nice day :-) So I came back and have been playing Pokémon ever since ^^'
Speaking of Pokémon, a quick progress report - I beat the Elite Four and Champion with a 10-15 level deficit XD My current team is as follows:
Enbuoo - Level 68
Warbiaru - Level 67
Purungeru - Level 66
Yanakkii - Level 65
Zeburaika - Level 65
Kokoromori - Level 64
Anyways, that's about it from me today. Might go out a bit later for a little while, we shall see. Bye bye for now :-)
[Edit on Sunday morning: After saying that was about it from me, I ended up staying out very late again ^^'. I got a call from a friend asking if I wanted to hang out, so we sat around for a bit talking, then went for a walk around a place off to the side of campus which I'd never been to before. We bumped into some people in front of the combini, then sat talking to them for a couple of hours, before deciding to go to a place called Cybex. It's this huge amusement complex a little way behind the dorms, though as none of our group of 4 was exactly sure where it was, we took a scenic, slightly creepy route there XD For starters, as the karaoke booths were full, we went to play table tennis for a while, which was really funny, and then had a bit of ice cream - they have soda fountains and a soft-serve ice cream machine, which I'd been searching for over summer but never found. Then once a booth freed up, and we were met by one of our other friends, we went and did some singing :-) Only when I sing into a mic do I realise how flat my voice is -_- Still, it was fun ^^. Then we walked home, I stood talking to my friends a bit more, then we all went home as it was about 4am at this point XD Still, it was lots of good fun ^^ Hopefully today will be good too]