Food, fun, and cherry blossom bliss

Life lately has been pretty nice. The cherry blossoms are out, it's getting warmer, and I finally feel like I have a bit of a social network. This weekend I went to a birthday party/gathering for a friend of a friend's. We went out to a couple of bars and to a club called Pure, in Shibuya. It was fun, I love dancing to really loud music. There was a rugby player from New Zealand who seemed to fancy me so we danced together for a good portion of the time and I just had a really good time. I also witnessed professional pole dancers for the first time, they were amazing! I never knew it took so much talent to pole dance, those girls are freakin' strong! Anyway, we stayed out all night and I finally crawled into bed around 6:30 am on Sunday just to crawl back out two hours later to get to play rehearsal in Yokohama at 11 am (a little under a 2 hour commute). By the time I returned from Yokohama I was pretty much dead so I slept for a very long time. On Monday my coworker had a Nigerian food party (he's originally from Nigeria) and it was quite splendid. He said that since his food selection was somewhat limited the dishes were more fusion than true Nigerian since he had to improvise a bit, but it still tasted great, very spicy!

Yesterday I didn't have to be at work until 6 pm so I decided to visit Ueno Park. The park is known for its spectacular cherry blossoms so I definitely wanted to check it out. I thought that since I was visiting on a Tuesday there might not be too many people but I was very wrong, apparently there are a lot of people in Japan who don't work during the day! Japanese people love to have cherry blossom viewing parties called Hanami and there were lots of them going on. Basically Hanami consist of a tarp on the ground under the trees, food, and lots of alcohol. I've also heard that some people bring mini-karaoke machines to these parties, but I didn't see any. In the park there was one path that was lined with hundreds of trees and that's where the majority of people had set up their tarps, which were blocked off by ropes. Other people just grabbed pieces of cardboard and set up makeshift parties wherever they could find space. I didn't join any parties, but I did take about five million pictures of the blossoms and people partying beneath them. I also went to Ueno Zoo which is within the park because it was said to be a very good zoo. I didn't really find it to be that spectacular, but I like animals so it was nice for a little while and there was a beautiful pond surrounded by cherry trees and willows so I took lots of pictures and walked around it. On my way out of the park as I walked back along the blossom covered path a Japanese man asked me in English if I wanted to have my picture taken. I said sure and chatted with him for a bit after he took the picture (actually, he didn't really take one, but I didn't bother to tell him since I already had enough). He told me he'd been to the U.S. five times and had visited San Francisco, Cape Cod, Wisconsin, and some other places that I can't remember. When I told him I was from Connecticut he said, "Oh, do you know Hartford? I've been there." WHAT??!! I was so shocked, because honestly, out of the entire country he had visited a city twenty minutes from where I grew up! He told me he had a friend who lived there so he went to visit him. Crazy crazy crazy! Living so far from home makes me forget sometimes what a small world this really is. Well, home will seem much closer this weekend because my parents are coming to visit and I'm so excited! Now I just need to clean... ehh, it'll happen... eventually.