06/27 - Like One Direction

You can have some fun

looking in one direction

singing your voice out


Tonight after work Aykut and I headed back home and changed clothes before going out for dinner at the closest restaurant to our house. We had a drink on the walk over. Myself, I tried an alcoholic can of green tea, which tasted just like green tea even though it was %4 alcohol. We had a nice dinner and a good chat and Aykut poured the plum wine he had with him into the orange juice he ordered, which was absolutely hilarious. After dinner we went back to our apartment building (PINUS) and met up with Lauren. The three of us took a leisurely stroll out of Higashi Murayama into Tokorozawa. On the strip by the station we played a couple of arcade games and while we did our friend Tim showed up.

The four of us were deciding where to go next when a guy from one of the several karaoke places on the street came over and started speaking to us in English. He was very nice and quite funny, so we chatted with him for a bit and he continued to lower his price for us. He ended up offering us nomihodai (all-you-can-drink) for an hour for around 1,000 yen (about $10 Canadian) and a cheap price to do the karaoke. We decided to take the offer, but before we headed in we wanted to get a picture with him, which led to one of the most memorable moments of the night. I asked a girl standing nearby to take the picture (in Japanese) and she agreed. While she took my phone to get the picture one of her friends, a guy, started shouting to me. He yelled "You look One Direction! One Direction!" This marks the third time since I've been in Japan that someone has told me I look like One Direction, which I guess means I look like five different people who are all much shorter and smaller than me, but also seems to be meant as a compliment.

Another of the most memorable parts of the night was when the guy who had convinced us to choose the establishment came back to our room to check on us. I turned the tables and did some convincing myself. I convinced him to sing a song with me before he left, his choice as long as it was English. He picked Usher "U Remind Me" so we belted it out together. "You remind me of a girl...that I...once knew...see her face whenever I...I look...at YOUUU!!!!"

The karaoke was a lot of fun, but in typical Paddy-level exuberance for singing, I blew out my voice almost immediately. This comes with the territory of making up for a lack of talent with all-out effort. It was quite cool that our group included a Canadian, a Turk, a New Zealander, an American, and briefly a Japanese fella.