Hello Ozzies!
Ok, I guess too much flipping back in time will piss off more than one. So I'll try to do some short posts about my recent boring life (now that I have to work, I get less time for trips, parties, dinners, etc, etc,...) in between.
Like Manuel's (a.k.a. Yamanote) birthday party. Why Yamanote? That is a fair enough question: like everybody else, Manuel enjoys sleeping after a good party. The only thing is that he is not able to wait until he arrives home...and do you know where he sleeps? Yes, you guessed right: in the metro! Tokyo has a circular line called Yamanote line, which Manuel seems to know pretty well since he's done the whole loop more than once, more than twice,...on both directions.
It was a surprise party : his flatmate (Riccardo, an Italian also from the Vulcanus program) made up a whole story in order to make him believe he was meeting a girl called Mayaka in Shibuya. He even created a Hotmail account for that purpose, and he told him "she" was a Japanese girl he met during a meeting at the EU Center (for the record, there was a meeting with alumni from the Vulcanus program in December). Poor Yamanote has a problem with names (specially girl's names), so it was a piece of cake making him believe all this.
When he arrived there (after setting up the date, he still didn't remember her name, lol!) and so us, he could only say something like "Pero que cabrones, como me la habeis liado...Mamonazos..." (The soft translation would be: How could you! I cannot believe it! Hey, I know it's not the real one, but you never know who's reading, and Dorothy is still a young girl who cannot read such things...). Of course, he was delighted by the surprise. He was even more delighted when he saw that there were also presents coming along...We wanted to offer him tickets for the
So we all went together to an izakaya (Japanese version of a pub) Riccardo had previously booked and had a very nice and wonderful evening. Of course, our dear Manuel did some speeches. One of them is here.
Manuel giving his speech for the first toast:
Good thing about izakayas (that pubs don't have), is that they normally have an "all you can eat, all you
can drink menu" for two hours. I suppose only real Japanese speakers (or Japanese, lol) are able to read the menus and actually understand what they are ordering. We just order in a random mode, doing some wild guesses about what kind of food we're asking. It's funny, and most of the times you get something eatable, or even nice! Trial , error, trial, error...until you find the dishes you like!
I think Yamanote didn't do his Yamanote thing, and decided to sleep for once in a static place, lol. But we all had a great time. I hope they do the same for me when my birthday comes...(dropping this kind of comments in the net may help, don't you think Toto? lol).
Happy birthday Manu! (Lol, maybe this is not the best picture to wish him this...)
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