Glenn's Birthday Party

I'm way behind on posting these, but since I'm missing Glenn extra today, what better day to post them? Since Veteran's day was a long weekend for most people around here, we headed to Tokyo to celebrate Glenn's birthday. We went to Baird Brewery where we went earlier in the summer.

The beer is still as good, the food just as yummy and the friends as great. Thanks for coming to celebrate with us!

The rest are from the train ride home. It takes about an hour to get home from Tokyo so bear with me...

Baird Brewing Company Harajuku

Glenn and I often define "vacation" as "day drinking" so it was no surprise that while he was home last weekend, we sought out places to spend our vacation. Glenn had read about Baird Brewing Company Taproom in his Food & Wine magazine's 'Best of...' lists. Since Tokyo is only an hour train ride away, we decided to check it out with some squadron friends.

Glenn, me, Jimmy, Mai, John, Angelica, Russell, Toni and Mike

Our reservation was at 3 pm and by the time we drank, ate, took a train home, took a cab to the gate, walked to our house from the gate, it was 11 pm. It was a long day of drinking! That may explain the rest of these pictures...

Hibiya Park Oktoberfest

Oktoberfest? Yeah, it's May. Oh well, the Js love a good party regardless of the month I suppose. Last weekend, I headed to Tokyo's Hibiya Park with some friends to check out the German beer, food and music!

Yes, the girl on the left is with our group. Angelica? What are you standing so far away? :)

 My lovely beer there- that guy cost me 5000 yen. Yes, it is giant, but I didn't want to stand in line twice so a 1 liter beer it is! 2000 yen of that cost is a glass deposit though so when you are finished you have to go stand in line anyways and get your money back. On the bright side though, at the end of the night when all the drunk people leave their glasses lying around, you can get their deposits back too.

Towards the end of the evening, we moved under the tent where the livelier crowd was. We met fun people from Australia, America and all those other fun English speaking countries. Here is a new friend. I named him Mao. I was going for the really tall Chinese basketball player, Yao, but it seemed close enough at the time.

Here's my favorite pictures from the day (keep in mind, we were there from noon til around 10 pm):

Notice Angelica's fistful of cash. That would be from the beer glasses we returned. Our friend, Aya, had a date that night with the guy on the left. We convinced her to have him meet us at the beer festival. Not sure that was the best idea. :) Hope your date went well!

AWA/AOSA Izakaya Night!

AWA is the Atsugi Wives Association which is the Japanese counterpart to AOSA, the Atsugi Officer Spouses' Association. On Friday night, we had our annual joint Izakaya night. An izakaya is a eating/drinking establishment. We had the private room upstairs and it was a great time! We drew numbers for our seats and I sat next to Yuko who was crazy fun. Here we are when the drinks just started flowing. We paid approxiately $50 for dinner and two hours of drinks so you had to get your drink on fast before the two hours ran out.

We got to the izakaya and the Japanese wives started things off with a skit and Japanese drinking games. These two were our MCs for the night. One was a Japanese drunk business man and the other was a thief. Not sure where the hula skirt fits in. Here's a picture of one of the games we played. It was a bunch of rubber bands and a pretzel stick and they had to make their way around the table without using your hands. The losing teams had to drink. The other game involved popping balloons with our body parts. Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of that game (although my team did win :) ).

After our two hours at dinner were up, we headed to Wink, a karaoke bar close by. Once we got there we realized that the bar only served whiskey and shochu (a Japanese rice liquor, kind like vodka-ish) so we made it work. I had my first whiskey and water. Bleh. It's hard to tell in the picture, but the entire karaoke bar was about the size of a large bedroom. We crammed all 30 of us in to the bar and sang away. Yuko and I sang John Denver's "Country Roads" which was the only song she knew in English besides "Yesterday". Where do these ladies learn this stuff?

This picture is one of my favorites of the night. Yuko is wearing a samurai costume hat. You can see why I liked her. I hope I see her again at the luncheon in November. Such a fun night. I'm so glad I went!

A few of my favorite people.

My favorite picture from my birthday party last weekend. All my favorite girls, including Stella!

This weekend was great as well. Chris' restaurant was amazing. I was stuffed after your 12+ course meal. Amazing though! My performance was not so hot during beer pong, but I did have one game winning shot I was pretty happy with :)

A few shots from the 1st annual Beck's Beer Pong Tournament.