Samurais, Icelanders, Salarymen, Sake

Well, Honestly I don't even know where to start. I'm not even sure how things came out the way they did. But hell, I'll at least try to cough something up.

So, we started out in Samurai Cafe as usual, bumped into a few old friends as well as some new acquaintances. One of these new comrades of ours, let us call him Sigu-chan, was an icelander who had been living in Japan most of his life, and has now been married to a Japanese woman for 7 years. He was thrilled to be able to have a conversation with people who could relate to what it is like to come from a frozen country filled with nature to a country centered around technology, unbearably hot summers and lack of forests.

The evening went on, and we kept on talking with Sigu-chan and some of our new local friends as it was starting to get close to Samurai Cafe's closing hours. What to do now? There was still plenty to discuss, and nobody was feeling tired yet. Coincidently Sigu-chan's wife was having a party at their place with their friends from around Japan, and Sigu-chan was kind enough to invite us to join them.

So off we went, visited a 24/7 convinience store to get a few more drinks for the occasion, and after a 10 minute walk we found ourselves in a small appartment with people more or less familiar to us. It took around 30 seconds to adjust to the situation, after which it almost felt like we had been doing this together for years. Few people were from Okinawa, one was a local salaryman who had slept 1 night at home this week due to just working around the clock, one was a guy with the coolest voice in the world, and of course there was Sigu-chan's wife who spoke fluent English and French in addition to Japanese.

The night went on and started to turn into dawn, the salaryman was showing us effection by stroking my hair and punching Miikka in the arm. We were told he's trying to show us he wants to talk with us, but can't because his English isn't that good. The other explanation was that we're taking all his women in Tokyo and he's taking his revenge on us (though in our opinion the first explanation seems more probable). The salaryman, who drank as hard as he worked, eventually passed out after stripping his shirt several times over. I'm sure you all agree the next logical step is to take a marker pen and draw things all over him. And since we thought he was becoming a fan of Finland we decided to leave a message along with the map of Finland on his chest, while his friends got creative with their drawings using his body parts as parts of their sketches.

Here's the result we worked so hard for:

Doesn't he look adorable?

Not long after he had passed out other people started feeling tired too, and one by one they went to bed until it was just TampioTravels, Sigu-chan and the guy with the coolest voice ever left. I started to feel the lack of sleep too, so we decided 7 in the morning was a good time to call it a day. Or a night. No, make that a morning. Anyhow, we started heading back to our hostel, watching people going to work, shopping etc. 7 in the morning. A Sunday morning. According to Sigu-chan and his wife, this was the true essence of drinking and socializing in Japan, or as one of my professors calls it: Nomunication.

So what do we learn from all of this? Go to Tokyo, say hi to a random person, the rest will take care of itself and you'll have a blast. TampioTravels over and out.


P.S. Here's our merry group of party people saying hi to all of you (isn't Miikka just radiating with happiness?)