firsts and lasts

First let me preface this with the fact that I slept in today. Yes, that's right, I didn't get up until 9:30. This alone is enough to make any day a good one.

In other news, today, June 11th, was Jenny's 20th birthday.

To celebrate, we told her to invite whoever she wanted to go to karaoke (it was going to be the first time she had ever done karaoke) later tonight and basically hung out the entire day. By hanging out, I mean we biked (again, very slowly) to Cains Mall (which is much like a Meijer with a dollar store and a McDonalds connected to it) where we did some grocery and souvenir shopping.

We picked up some essentials at the hyaku en store that we'd recently run out of. Chocolate chips for our pancakes, snacks for in-between meals like our affectionately nicknamed 'crack chips', more kanji flash cards, etc. Of course we bought stuff we didn't need, too, like lacy gloves, key covers, bobby pins... and then we headed over to the real store to look for a bag of rice (we have discovered that we struggle to find things to eat when we don't have any rice in the apartment), a thin bath towel for Jenny (since nothing ever dries here), and I wandered off to look at the shoes.

Yes, the shoes.

My trustiest pair that I brought with me to Japan got...destroyed, over the past month. Between rain and other...forces of nature... they were just disgusting. I washed them, dried them, sprayed them and nothing was helping them. I was planning on retiring them after this trip, anyway, but as this is the rainy season and I could no longer wear those on the rainy days (yes they had already been deemed the water shoes since they were in such bad condition), I had to throw them out and find a cheap pair in some shop out here that was in super large behemoth size and relatively cheap. Somehow, I found some.

I got so lucky with these.

The shiny pretty rubber ones are Japan made rain proof super comfortable under 20 yen shoes.

The dirty grey colored disfigured nasty other shoes are the ones that have been with me 3 years, seen the world, and have met their end. Their very last day.

I feel weird getting rid of a pair of my shoes. My feet have literally not gotten any bigger since 6th grade, and therefore I still have all of my shoes that I had in 6th grade (give or take a pair of tennis shoes here and there). I don't get rid of shoes, I just acquire more. I'm a girl, it's what I do.

Jenny ended up finding a pair of rain boots she liked as well, and happily bought them for around 20 yen if I remember correctly. All of this buying stuff with money that feels more like funny munny than anything else worked up an appetite (oh and that bike ride probably helped too...) so we embraced our American birthrights and ordered food at the McDonalds. LL sets and all. (LL is the biggest size, typically, that you can get for anything in Japan)

By the time we made it back with all of our purchases, it was about 6pm. Jenny had been telling people we would be heading out to karaoke around 6 or 7, so Ashley and I were really worried about how our surprise was going to fit in with this schedule.

The plan was this. Buy a delicious strawberry cake (like the slices we'd been snagging in Tokyo), get some cheap candles, gather our gifts and invite Jenny down to our room for a minute because she 'forgot one of her bags'. After Rory returned from a biking journey, we set up camp and got ready to call her room.

Now, after seeing the state of that cake you may be wondering just what the heck we did to it. The day it was bought, Rory was traveling by bike from a neighboring city and it was very hot and humid. So much so that the ice packs that were meant to help maintain the cake's beauty through the journey couldn't do anything to keep the heavy fruit from sliding and breaking the cake a little.

Ashley and I tried to doctor it, and immediately put it in the freezer to try to set it a little. A great idea right? Sure, if you remember to take it out of the freezer after a half an hour or so. Especially since our freezer likes to deep freeze anything that goes into it.

We forgot to remove it from the freezer until today (Rory bought the cake yesterday).

By the time Jenny had come in and been surprised (at least a little) and blown out the candles on the cake, we were hoping that it would have thawed out. Slicing through the cake proved otherwise, but it was really just the fruit that had super frozen. Everything else was still delicious, and Jenny seemed to be very happy about the whole thing.

After we had stuffed our faces with cake, we sent Jenny out recruiting the people she had asked to come to karaoke while we cleaned up and got ready to go. It turned out that this weekend was just an off weekend for a lot of people, whether they were sick, or out somewhere already, or whatever, so the group was just five people: Jenny, Ashley, Rory, me and a girl from Michigan State named Carmisha, and off to Pals Karaoke we went.

It was a great night, we all sang until out throats were raw and speaking involved squeaking, and had a lot of fun. It didn't even end up being all that expensive because Rory still had the $13 worth of coupons from last time all of us went to Pals to put towards the cost of us renting a booth for 3 hours.

Tomorrow we get to rest and do homework and study, because that's what we're here for, but at least Ashley and I can make chocolate chip pancakes once more for breakfast, and I can let my voice recover for the day.