does it get any better...

So... as all of you know... I practice kendo. The group I joined at Waseda has been a little, well, difficult to fit into. Not for lack of trying on my part (or on the part of my good friend, Shivani's either). Some days we were barely getting an aisatsu (greeting) in return to our rather genki greetings. We tried and tried... our last hope was the drinking party on Thursday. We figured if we made no headway there... we'd write everyone off and kind of stop trying...

Luckily... we won't be doing that... because the drinking party was a success! :-)

Thursday, we practiced kendo as usual... and afterwards, at 9:30, the nomikai (drinking party) would start. Shivani, much better at doing the Japanese thing, asked one of our sempai (older, more experienced kendo members) if we might attend. To which he responded, sugoi (wow! cool!). Always a good sign, I was chatting with some of the other girls at that time... and when that sempai passed me he also asked if I was going... and I said yes. Once again... favorable response. Yay!

Well, Shivani and I were both starving... so we followed the other girls down to the bar (turns out this bar is the "center" of Waseda drinking culture!) and headed to the McD's for a quick bite before starting to "binge" drink (in Japan they drink out of tiny glasses, so you can't really binge!).

We headed back to the drinking establishment and were met by Ito-sempai, who had formerly been rather unfriendly. But she got us sat down and situated with Kimura and Ichimura sempai. It was great... we started drinking and actually talking to some of the people we'd been practicing with for over a month... and the great thing was - they are SUPER nice people. Of course they wanted to know the basics... whether we like beer... where we're from... what we study... all that. And then they got us started trying to get others to drink!

Basically, that entailed taking a bottle of beer over to a sempai and saying, dozo (in this context that means, please drink!) and getting them to chug the remainder of the bottle. It was rather fun, in fact that's how I got switched to a different table... after forcing someone to drink I just hung around and talked a bit.

Then I got kidnapped by Matsugaki-sempai and two other sempai (one was Kawaguchi and the other.... I don't remember his name!). We got to talking about all sorts of things... mostly related to drinking. But they realized that I was quite strong (in comparison to Japanese people) at drinking. So as a consequence when anyone said something amusing, one would say "Love Beer!!" and we'd all finish our beer and pour another round. It was great!! And at the end of the night... I wasn't too drunk... if only I hadn't had to carry my bogu home... then I would have been ok...

Needless to say... Shivani and I have bonded with the kendo people... and we're definitely IN!!! :-)