new year's eve!

i suppose i'll start off with the events of new year's eve. in a nutshell, ben came over to my house because his laptop unexpectedly died the night before. while he was building a new one online, i finished the rest of my "top-to-bottom" new year's cleaning. we stayed at the house and hung out until dinnertime. i wanted to take him to osaka osho, an inexpensive and extremely delicious (japanese) chinese restaurant in katsura, but it was closed. so we went to shijo, where he wanted to take me to gyoza no osho, another inexpensive and supposedly yummy chinese restaurant, but that was closed too. *surprise surprise* it was new year's eve, after all. we walked around for a while and finally decided on a matsuya-like restaurant.

then we went to starbucks (sanjo) to meet becca, eric, and lauren before going to the hub. ben and i had gone to lawson's just before, but i was already glowing from the can of 5% peach cocktail. (he finished a stronger, larger can of beer looong before i did >_<) when we got to the hub, it was surprisingly relatively empty. we found coat hooks on the wall and managed to get a table. i waited a while before i got a peach cooler, followed by a tarantula (yummy, but 30 proof), some of becca's beer, some of ben's mojito, and then too much champagne (ben generously got the table a bottle). there's a reason for listing what i had to drink last night---i'll get to that in another post.

the rest of the night involved: immature 16, 17-year olds at the next table over who couldn't dress themselves from australia, brutal/hard-to-watch boxing matches on tv, party poppers at the end of the countdown, followed by four kisses to open the new year, warding off older guys who wanted to do karaoke,  and meeting ben's girlfriend rika for the first time. 

i got home around 2:30am ~ i wasn't feeling too well, but a lot better than about an hour earlier. elliot texted me, hoping that i could make it to the pig & whistle, another british pub. i would've loved to go, but i was already at kawaramachi eki (and was in no condition to wander back to sanjo by myself in dress heels). i texted danielle earlier too, but she was nowhere close to where i was. with the exception of mia (and elliot), i haven't hung out with the other midd kids in a while. the other day, my host mom asked me what they had been up to, and i couldn't give her an answer. *red flag* why didn't i know? even if we were all going in different directions, i felt like i should've at least had an idea of what everyone had been doing-- but i didn't. 

i'll say this much, "it shouldn't be this hard."