Christmas is Coming

Christmas is fast approaching huh...  It doesn't feel like anywhere close to Christmas.  Maybe its because I didn't celebrate turkey day with family this year.

Have a Christmas Cake.  <3
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Japanese Word of the Post:
Maneku - to beckon or invite.  The cat who has it's paw up is often called a maneki neko because it "beckons" customers into a shop, which is why the cat is often set out in front of stores.

Now that that little tidbit is done, on with the meat of this post.

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Today and yesterday were both pretty full with activities, today more so than yesterday.  It's been a very fun and busy week.

Yesterday Sarah, Elise, and I went to Karaoke together.  That was about the only thing we really did yesterday but it was a lot of fun.  Originally we were going to go to a place called Maneki Neko.  It's the cheapest place we were told about in our little city of Minami Kashiwa, and I'm pretty sure it isn't a lie.

This is how the shop works: if you go early in the day, you can get an hour of karaoke time for 5 yen.  That's maybe 8 cents at the the current rate of exchange.  So you can go 3, 4, or even 5 hours for under 50 yen.

There is a catch though.  In order for you to get this deal, you have to, first, be a member in the karaoke bar (something that Sarah was able to do rather quickly on our first go), and second, buy either a drink or 'all you can drink' per person.  The all you can drink goes for 400 yen or so.  A drink is from 300 yen and up.  Obviously the better choice would be 'all you can drink'.

So with Sarah, Elise, and I, the total comes out to roughly 1215 yen.  So each person has to chip in about 405 yen each time we go.  Three hours of rigorous singing between three people is not a bad deal.  And though the time flies fast, it doesn't seem too bad.  Just have to tell you that too many people makes the place rather crowded, and lowers the amount of songs one person can sing in the duration of the time.  Three people for three hours is usually good.

So, we went to Maneki Neko but they were full.  So we decided to go to a different place, closer to the train station.  It's usually more expensive than Maneki Neko but because we went for a short amount of time, and the drinks are included in the purchase as "all-you-can-drink", and we are students (students get a discount), we actually spent less money than we would have.

The place is much nicer too.  It's on the fourth floor of a building that I didn't take a picture of.  The inside is pearly white and clean, and spacious.  It's also a double decker, so the top two floors of the building (floor 4 and 5) are for the karaoke bar.

All you can drink!  It's in English!! (I never noticed that before.....)
 


It's a nice and comfy place, no?   The television is on the right side where we can't see...




There's the television.

The songs we sang always had the weirdest music videos.  Made little to no sense at all.




That was a lot of fun.  More than likely there will be a lot more times that we go to karaoke in the future.  It's become more of an every Wednesday thing.

On Thursday (today), a lot of things happened.  First of all, in my Japanese class, our class was basically broken up into: take at test, practice our speeches, listen to music, go to lunch, come back and make cakes, eat cakes, do our speeches, and sing the songs we listened to.  The best thing about the whole class was, in fact, the cake making.  And that's also what we took pictures of.

The cake was made using sweet biscuits (they were more like wafers in my opinion), and instant cream.  It was a real simple process.

Basically, you mix the cream until its ready, then you coat one side of the biscuit in the cream and stick another one onto it.





You repeat this process until you have a rather long "biscuit" cake.  Then you layer the whole cake itself with more of the cream.  You cool it in the fridge for a while until it's a bit harder, then you proceed to decorate it.  (We went straight to decorating because of both a lack of time and a lack of a fridge.




After Decorating, you eat it, or you store it in the freezer.

It's that simple!  Let's have a look at the ones that our (tiny) class made...

(From Thai) Name's


(From Bhutan) Jigme's


(From Germany) Chris'


(From Germany) Elise's


(From America) Stephan's


Group Photo!


Finally time to eat it.

Though I actually waited until after class to bring it to the fifth floor to share with Sarah.  :D


Eating with hashi.  Hahaha.  That's not how you eat cake...





So after enjoying our cake we decided to go to Don Kiyote (I don't even know how to spell it in English.)  We went to buy our christmas attire for the christmas party tomorrow.  In the process of buying it, though, I decided to try my luck at a crane draw.


Wohoo, I won!  And it only cost me 100 yen!  That gold paper is the paper that showed that I won.
(Thanks for posing for me Sarah!)




Anyways, I have a test tomorrow so I'm going to study now.

I'll post again when something else interesting happens!

For now, Ciao