Last Big Night in Niigata

Last night I went to the Sayonara Party at Immigrants Cafe, followed by the obligatory early-morning karaoke, and it will probably be the last time we'll all get together like that. It's the end of an era, and cliched as that statement is, it sums up my feelings today.

So how did the day go? Well, I woke late on Sunday and decided to take teh car instead of teh bus up to Niigata. Keiko had plenty of time to get up to Niigata, so I took it easy up the Expressway to Niigata. (Actually, I limited myself to 80-90 kph and found I used around an eighth of a tank instead of the usual quarter. The journey only took an extra 20 minutes too!). We checked into our hotel and wandered round Bandai for teh afternoon, having lunch at Freshnes Burger and chatting to the guy in Murasaki Sports about skateboards (I need something to satisfy my carving cravings until the snow arrives!) Prepared myself for an all nighter by having a nap at the hotel before getting ready to go out.

Got to Immigrants around 8.30 and paid my 3,500 yen for the tabe-nomihodai (it was an all you can eat and drink party). I felt quite strange all night. One the one hand, it was great to be out with everyone, but at the back of my mind there was always the feeling of "Shit, this is the last time we'll all be out together". And whenever I was talking to someone, I couldn't relax because I was worried I'd run out of time to talk to everyone else. Eventually, the nomihodai did it;s trick and I got drunk enough to stop worrying about all this and just went with the flow. And taking advantage of the tabehodai early made sure I didn't get ridiculously drunk too quickly.

At the end of teh night, we all managed to put off tearful goodbyes outside Immigrants by piling over to Shidax for karaoke. We had teh biggest room Sidaz could offer and for teh next two hours we belted out ear-spliting versions of all our favourite songs. Perfect! At the end, Troy somehow managed to organise money from twenty drunks to pay for the rooms! We spilled out onto the streets around 6am and people started looking for taxis home. Tom got into an argument with a stranger. I didn't see how it started but I did see Tom determined to straighten things out. He follow the guy down the street and spent the next five/ten minutes apologising and talking it over wuth the guy. In the end, they were sharing jokes before saying goodbye and going their seperate ways. It was amazing to see.

Check-out time at our hotel was 1pm, so Keiko and I managed to get a few hours of sleep in. We woke, went for breakfast (well, dinner) at Milan, the footy cafe. Later we met Debs and the girls in Capricosa and had coffee and cake. Debs said that the new season's snowboards were in Murasaki Sports so we went up to have a look. I miss the snow!

Then we headed back to my car and came back to Toka. Again, I took it easy and again I was suprised at how much petrol I saved. Why haven't I been doing this before? I could have saved loads of cash! Maybe enough for one of them new boards I saw.