Moveable Type: Day 140 in Japan - Happy Birthday, Jodie!

I was desperately hanging out for the weekend this week, so when we woke up on Saturday morning to sun, it was exactly what I needed. But wait, there's more! We got to talk to Fletch this morning! He was just coming in from a day of trapising around New York city, and the timing actually worked out that we could both be on Skype at the same time. And I had a dumpling for breakfast - what a perfect start to the weekend! Sam headed off to work, and I pottered around doing bits of housework in our sunny (but still chilly) apartment until I had to head out to my Japanese lesson. I gave Kojima-sensei her present from Mum and Dad today (and she totally loved it, guys! She thought it was beautiful, and was very happy to hear that you liked the presents from her very much), and had a really good lesson. We even went out for a Thai food lunch after the lesson, and I found a brilliant new Thai restaurant in Akashi to frequent.

Then I headed to Starbucks to work on a paper from Monash for a few hours. It was nice to get out of the house to get some of this work done, and I think I might stick with this strategy to try to finish up this paper to send back to Melbourne (and the caffeine helps to keep me awake through the process too). I got the Methods knocked out, and started to make some figures when my laptop battery died (apparently there is nowhere to charge a laptop in Starbucks here), so I headed home to dump my study stuff before heading out again. On the train, there were a really oddly high number of "Dad" looking middle aged men wearing trackpants all drinking chu hai out of cans. They were all alone, and I also saw about 3-4 of them in Akashi station, and another 3-4 of them on my walk home from the station. Is there some kind of "wear trackpants in public places and drink girly alcoholic drinks from cans" public holiday that no one told me about? I would be in for that.

Tonight was Jodie's birthday, so we went out for Turkish food in Sannomiya.. The place was really nice - Cafe Istanbul - and we got to eat LAMB! They had Premium Malt on the menu, and pita bread with dips and apple tea. It was a brilliant dinner with really nice people. Afterwards, we went to a club-ish place in Sannomiya (Trinity), and drank 500 yen gin and tonics. Sam ran into a friend from work, whose sister-in-law was DJing (the music was pretty ordinary), and we all cought our last trains home without incident.