Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Karaoke, Driving and Pastry Shops

Well, I've survived driving in Japan. It's not as hard driving on the opposite side of everything as one might imagine. I'm quite okay if I'm on a highway or a road with a dividing line. I don't really feel the need to have to think too much about which lane I should be in. But once I get on the back residential roads where there are no dividing lines forget it, I will always be on the right-hand side, guaranteed. A lot of people have tried to pull into that road and nearly ran into me because I'm not on the correct side...oops :) If you (person reading this blog) has seen my facebook pictures you have seen the little white midget car that was going to be ours. But it's not bahahahaha!!!! Thank God. We actually are now the proud "owners" of a Daihatsu Cuore...a 2000 I believe. It's the cutest little car and it half reminds me of a Mini Cooper. Everyone says we have the nicest car at GEM School which is nice thought because it IS pretty nice I find. The cars around here are sooooo small. The other day I was driving alone and actually laughed out loud at the thought of my dad's giant truck trying to get around here. The roads are narrow and the parking spaces are miniscule. I had a nice chuckle. Actually, the cars themselves are a strange breed. There are definitely a lot of names and makes that I've never seen before like the Toyota Noah minivan, for example. Also, a lot of the Lexus cars I've seen don't have the "Lexus" symbol on them. It's the exact Lexus vehicle but with a Toyota symbol on it because Toyota owns Lexus.

So it's become clear that the only fast food that is around Japan (Or at least just around Kagawa) is McDonald's. No BK, no Taco Bell, no Wendy's...McDonald's only. So normally I'd think "Wow! Amazing! I'm going to lose so much weight from not having fast food around to eat!" WRONG. In place of the BKs and Taco Bells are the most delicious pastry shops in the entire world. Just bakery after bakery with scrumptious, evil smells wafting through the air to lure in the passerbys. My favorite one is in the Shotengai in Takamatsu. I make a point to stop every time I'm in there to buy a loaf of bread and some sort of sweet. My favorite thing is a round shaped sweet bread with a dip/hole thing in the middle. In that middle dip is cream cheese, custard and strawberries and blueberries. Delish. I also just discovered that there is one of these destructive pastry shops ON MY BLOCK. Bad, bad, bad.

We went Karaokeing!!! Karaoke isn't that big of a deal in the USA but considering this is the land where it was founded it's amazing and sooo much fun. This isn't like Karaoke back home where you pick a song from a book, tell the karaoke guy, get two mikes that are hooked up to an amp and read off of a tv screen. When you get to the Karaoke bar/club wherever you go they give you a little portable screen that you take to your table to pick songs from. You pick whatever, whenever and then it will come up on the screens in the order they were picked by you or the other people around who have the little screens. The place I went to was one big room but I guess most of them are a bunch of separate cubicles that you and a group of people go into and sing. Al and I had a very nice duet of "Total Eclipse of the Heart" and Al did a stellar redition of Kanye's "Run This Town"...rapping and all. I have a video. He won't let me put it on Youtube.

Our phone number here at the house is 1-304-581-4573. Anyone can call, it's a WV phone number just watch the hours that you call since we're 13 hours ahead.

Xoxo

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