The party was very effective at getting me sloshed. I’ll post photos when I can see again.

This country is GREAT!

The word “bonenkai” is composed of 3 characters.

The first means “forget.” The second means “year.” And the third means “party.”

And like every Japanese work/lab gathering, it involves lots and lots of drinking. It’s a social obligation, you see. So it would be rude of me not to.

Do you see where this is going?

Normal Japanese behavior on a bus goes like this: nobody sits next to, looks at, or talks to anyone they don’t know. This usually results in a silent bus where half of the people are standing up while trying very hard to look asleep.

By chance I got one of the first seats on the bus this morning, which seats 2. Half of me reveled at the chance at a social experiment, while the other half hoped I wouldn’t be stuck next to another crazy person. Who would be brave enough to sit next to the foreigner?

No sooner had the thought entered my mind than a beautiful young woman boarded and sat down. Not wanting to push my newfound luck, I kept my mouth shut. About 5 minutes later she struck up a conversation.

Her name was Yuu, and she was relatively new in Sendai. She had just returned from Fiji where she lived for a couple years. She told me 2 phrases in Fiji: hello and I love you. At this point I was a bit suspicious of her motives… but she found out I was 21 and she was in shock. She was 28.

For those of you who want to know the gritty details, I completely reworked a perl script written up by this guy. OK, I pretty much rewrote it from scratch. Now it will post attachments onto a different server, meaning my emails go to a server other than randomwisdom. This server breaks apart the email into text and attachments, uploads the attachments with random file names, and then posts the text of the email.