Hunkering, turnips, and kisses

Last night was our school's Christmas party/my welcome party/the old teacher's farewell party. It was a lot of fun and nice being with my students and co-workers in a more social atmosphere. I also had the chance to meet a few new people, including a teacher who taught at my school a year or two ago and a friend of the teacher who I'm replacing (he had just flown in from Australia that day!). Overall it was a rather pleasant evening, but there was one particular moment that caught me off guard. Towards the end of the party I was randomly kissed by my co-worker. Now, I want to make it clear that normally I would not share details about this sort of thing, but this was so bizarre that I felt it was an acceptable topic to write about. We were in the restaurant with a bunch of our students, I walked over to join the group of people talking in the back, and basically it went something like this...

Co-worker: Oh, I'll kiss Leila!
Me: Ummmm...
Leila grins nervously, co-worker kisses Leila, people take pictures... ok then.

It was definitely not something I had envisioned happening at all, let alone at a school function, but I didn't really mind too much. I discovered afterwards that he basically kisses everyone once he's had enough to drink, in fact he'd kissed at least 5 or 6 of the people that were standing there when it happened (including some of the business men). He's also pretty damn cute, so who am I to complain? The other thing is that I know had this same thing happened to me a few years ago I would have been mortified. Knowing that I've gained enough confidence to handle a reasonably awkward situation with grace makes me feel good about myself. Later my co-worker actually did apologize for putting me on the spot like that and I said it wasn't a big deal, because it wasn't. Still, I do want a copy of that picture!

A bunch of us went out to sing karaoke after the party and that was also a good time. I forgot to mention in my earlier posts that there is a karaoke place under the school I work for. By under I mean, we're on the 5th floor, karaoke is on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th, so when I take the elevator up to work everyday, I always hear people singing very badly as I'm rising to the top. We ended up renting a room at that place. For those of you who are unaware, karaoke is done a little differently in Japan from the way it's usually done in the U.S. Instead of having just one karaoke machine at the front of the bar, you rent a little private room with your friends and order food and drinks over a phone in the room. To make things even more interesting at this specific location, every time a song finished our karaoke machine forced us to play a game before we could move on to the next song. And what was the game? Find the turnip. Yeah, I'm serious. There was a little hand that you could move over three stems in a garden and once you chose one, the stem would spring up and it would either be the prized turnip or a variety of other bizarre images ranging from egg plants to golden muscle men. Whoever created the game (and decided to install it on the karaoke machine) had some serious issues and had taken some serious drugs. After a few hours of karaoke I got really tired. It was 2:30 am and thanks to some hellish nightmares over the past few days, I hadn't gotten much sleep, so I was the first to leave. Everyone else stayed until 5 in the morning, so I'm glad I didn't try to stick it out, since I had to be at the kids Christmas party by 10 am this morning... ughhh.

Today after the kids party I met up with my friend Jen in an area called Roppongi. We walked around a very modern and beautiful building complex called Roppongi Hills, that has a bunch of very posh stores and restaurants. We couldn't really afford to go in any of them, but it was nice to dream. Speaking of dreams, I'm ridiculously tired, so I think I'm going to hunker down and watch a movie and then go to sleep (I really just wanted to use the word "hunker" because I've never actually written it in a sentence before.) Hunkering will commence now.