Birthday!!

On September the 5th, I celebrated my 28th Birthday - cue everyone under 28 saying "wow, you're really old now" and everyone over 28 saying "ah, but you're not 30 yet at least". On my actually Birthday, I was working so I celebrated properly the following night with some food and karaoke (of course).

The local karaoke place charges a single fee if you go after 11, however long you stay up until 6am, so that's the one we normally go for. This only includes one drink though, and as ordering drinks via telephone can be a little hit and miss in these places, not to mention s-l-o-w, we always take in our own from the local convenience store. I think technically you're not meant to do this, but they don't seem to enforce this rule to rigidly. In fact, at one point late in the night one of the staff came in to check how many people were left and there were cans and bottle all over the place. I was going to try and surreptitiously cover some of them up, but with the amount of drinking debris on show this would just have patronised the guy's intelligence - it looked like a recycling plant. He didn't say anything about it anyway (or if he did, it was in Japanese an thus I could safely plead ignorance).

Gradually the numbers thinned out until the just a hardcore four of us were left at 5am - we stopped in the end because our tracheas were starting to close up and making our renditions even more torturous than normal. I finally got to bed at 6:30, after some food at a nearby 24 hour place. Not bad for an old guy :)

Some photos of the night can be found here:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=53219&l=ed5d5&id=697195509

Also, thanks very much to everyone who wished me happy Birthday, it was very much appreciated! It always feels a bit funny to be away from home for special occasions, and nothings more special than my bloody Birthday so little messages from people back home always give me a warm and fuzzy :)