St. Patrick's Day

On St. Patrick's Day, Julie and I went to the Irish pub to join in on an ALT's birthday party. Of course, since it was St. Patrick's Day, it was packed full of people. Not only were all the seats filled, all the rest of the space was full of people standing. It was horribly loud and moderately uncomfortable. After one beer, I decided I'd had about as much of the place as I could take, so I told Julie I would go hang out at Hirome for a while and meet up with her later when it was time to go dancing. She offered to go with me, but since she was enjoying the party I told her I'd be fine on my own for a while.

At Hirome I found an empty table in a fairly quiet area and sat by myself with a drink. I was mostly left to my own devices, but at one point a young man came over and asked if I wanted to eat some chicken. I told him I was full, at which point he informed me that he had already ordered the chicken. So I said I'd eat some. He left and came back with a plate of chicken wings. He started asking me questions, but since he was talking so quickly, I struggled to understand him. After I'd made him repeat himself a few times, he told me he was going to go eat somewhere else. He put half of the wings on a plate for me, took the rest and promptly left. I was pretty confused as to what had just happened. I'd assumed that he wanted to eat the chicken with me, but it seemed that he had given up or lost patience. I sat around for a while wondering if he was coming back, but eventually I came to the conclusion that he was not. Since I didn't really want the chicken to begin with, I offered it to some ladies sitting at the table next to me, and had a nice chat with them. They were flight attendants from Tokyo. The best moment was when the chicken guy walked past with a friend and saw that I'd given the chicken to other people. I wanted to laugh, but managed to keep a straight face.

When it was closing time at Hirome, I went back to the Irish pub to meet up with Julie. It was much less crowded but still quite loud. All the same, I hung around with the remaining group until it was time to go dancing. Julie and I decided to check out a few clubs, and it turned out that a few were having events. The music at Dahlia sounded terrible, as usual, and we couldn't find our way to Atamajaxxy, so we ended up at One Love. It was fairly empty and the music was mostly reggae, but we were determined to dance anyway. After a while, an older couple dressed in business attire came in with a young man, apparently their son. The old man came over to bug Julie and I. We avoided his questions for a bit, but then they bought us drinks and we had to go thank them, and he started up with the obnoxiousness again. Honestly, he wasn't nearly as bad as other people we've had to deal with, but it just felt awkward and uncomfortable. He seemed to be hitting on us on behalf of his son. When his son came over to dance with us, it turned out that he was even more awkward than his father. In an attempt at dancing, the son sort of dragged me around the dance floor for a bit. Julie and I ended up chugging our drinks so we could leave as quickly as possible and escape the two of them.

After that, we ran into some of the other ALTs and hung around with them for a bit at Chuo Koen. A few people had musical instruments, so they played and sang until some police officers came over and told them to be quiet. By then my feet were tired and my interest in socializing had about run out, so we headed back home. It was a fairly quiet St. Patrick's Day, all things considered.