Birthday celebrations ... The thrilling conclusion!

ごめんね、最近全然日本語書いてへんな。もう午前二時やから短いバージョン：誕生日のピックニクの後で一つの小さいディンナーパーティーして、アルビンとリンダリンダとキャムがめちゃ美味しいもん作ってくれた！その後の土曜日めちゃ楽しい餃子パーティーやった。新しい友達も来たし、長ーく会ってへん友達も来たし、ケーキ二つもくれたし、とってもいいパーティーだった！囲碁ももちろんやって、その後ﾋﾞﾙ･ｱﾝﾄﾞ･ﾃｯﾄﾞｽﾞ･ｴｸｾﾚﾝﾄ･ｱﾄﾞﾍﾞﾝﾁｬｰって言うめちゃくちゃ好きな映画を見た！俺とキャム以外はみんな寝ちゃったらしいけどな。(>_<)

So I'm still way behind in documenting everything. I'll try to keep this less wordy and more photojournalistic. The short summary - Thursday night, a quiet dinner with my Vancouver buds back at Alvin's place. Alvin, Linda, and Cam threw together an outrageous meal complete with log roll birthday cake for me! You guys are so awesome.


As the winds started to pick up Friday night (in a figurative sense, of course) Linda helped me out with planning the menu and doing the shopping for Saturday's party. Alvin provided hardware - frying pans, mixing bowls, a cutting board, and his laptop (handy, because it doubles as a cutting board. yes, I'm just being silly). The plan was to get gyoza stuffings and chop them ahead of time, so that as guests arrived they could start folding and puckering the gyoza into their mature form. Then throw them in the pan, sizzle, steam, and serve. We planned for the worst, buying ingredients for something like 280 gyozas, using seven different recipes. Hauling the stuff back to my house was like stocking a fallout shelter in preparation for a nuclear winter. My fridge was stuffed beyond its capacity, and what vegetables would not fit were piled around my kitchen.

After all that shopping, nobody had any energy for chopping, so we gave up on preparations for the evening. We needed to save our energy for carrying a mikoshi the next morning (I'll write about this in a separate post).

Skip ahead to 2pm, when we were supposed to get back from the mikoshi festival. No, actually, why don't we skip ahead to like 5:30pm, when we actually DID get back. :) Everybody went to their respective homes to refresh / get dressed / crash from the physical exertion. I frantically cleaned my room and dashed off on last-minute shopping runs. Finally 7pm rolled around. Yuki and Yuki and Yuka show up, I hand them knives and cutting boards and veggies. More and more guests show up and join in the maelstrom of chopping and mixing. I'm running around, either meeting people by the station (several people got lost trying to follow my directions - my apartment isn't in the most obvious location) or mixing drinks for people, occasionally tag-teaming in to chop some nira or garlic.

There was a great mix of people there - my old friends Peter and Miki showed up, as well as one of my completely insane Japanese coworkers and an amazing international mix of other friends. Two different groups of friends brought me birthday cakes, too! That was really awesome, and actually it was a good thing because we had way too many people for one cake.

After a couple attempts, I had all the candles out (hey, I'm getting on in years! and aerodynamically speaking, it's much more difficult to generate sufficient flow velocity when you're trying to cover the 90 degree span containing two cakes with a single breath... and you're inebriated. ;)

That brief interlude over, the flow of the party swept back into full force, steam and oil flying from the kitchen, with trays of folded gyoza sweeping in and trays of cooked gyoza coming out in their place. The flow of it all was greased with alcohol and conversation.

I got some great presents - some funky socks, a rare piece of abstract art, a takoyaki cooker that I'm now obligated to use at my next party, and a Hanshin Tigers jersey! This was like 4 days before they lost their fourth straight game in the Japan series... guess I'll have to wait till next year to wear it. (yeah, right - like there's ever an off-season for Tigers pride in Osaka!)

So, being surrounded by good friends, with good music on the iTunes shuffle list, good food in my tummy, and good alcohol in everybody's cups, I decided to get the party started, so to speak, and I busted out the go boards, awww yeah! (Wish I had a pic to put here!)

Long story short, after some crazy action on the go boards and some spinning-flying-how-the-hell-did-he-launch-himself-in-the-air-like-that dropkick-on-my-neck action, we all settled in to watch Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, an excellent finale for the evening since half the people there were starting to zone out anyway. The Japanese people didn't understand it, the Chinese people had never seen it but were only present and awake for like 5 minutes of it, and the Germans were lost somewhere in the torrential 4am downpours outside. Cam and I were the only ones completely aware of the movie, and we both were chuckling 30 seconds before each funny part, and nobody had any clue why. I translated the first 10 mins or so of the movie for the people near me, but ... sometimes you've just gotta be there, ya know?

Anyway, it was all in all a worthy party to kick off my alleged adulthood. Thanks to Cam for taking pretty much all of the pictures here. Anybody else got pics? I was too busy partying! Thanks especially for this picture on the left here with all the beautiful ladies! Little fantasy of mine - ah, if only every day could be like that!

Oh, wait, it is...