breaking the watermelon.

Damn, I drank too much this weekend. I went to four drinking parties in two days, and didn't really sleep at all. The first was a party for our student teachers, which were at our school for three weeks studying how to be real teachers. It was pretty early, and afterwards I was also able to go to a later drinking party at the University where I take Japanese. But it started late because the teachers all forgot to make a reservation. It didn't feel as late as it was, so all of the teachers missed their trains home, so it turned out that the drinking lasted until about 4:30 or so, when the trains began to start up again. After that, I went home and crashed for a few short hours. But not very long, because the next drinking party was an Awa Odori reunion barbeque and started at 11:00 and of course revolved around drinking, much like the Awa Odori festival itself always did. One thing I got to do that was pretty cool was smash a watermelon with a baseball bat while blindfolded. It's a fun Japanese sport called suicawari (西瓜割り) which of course means "watermelon break." It was especially fun knowing that watermelons cost like $20 here. And check out Mr. Kawashima's lawn! This is an amazing lawn for Japan. You can tell this guy works for the mayor. It was seriously like carpet. After this drink-eque ended at about 4:30, I went directly to another nomikai being held by my school, this one for seemingly no reason whatsoever. It was fun though I was barely conscious. I have to admit that my karaoke was probably not up to snuff, even though (or because) I couldn't really hear myself well enough to know. Everyone kept saying "Eigo umai!" which means I am really good at English, which means that they couldn't find anything else to compliment me about.