Darius` birthday

On the 21st I went to Inuyama for Darius' birthday party. There were just a few of us there (the problem with working as a teacher is that everyone has different days off) and I got to meet Sian, the new teacher at Iain's school, and her flatmate Lisa. They both seemed really nice people, and Lisa speaks pretty good Japanese. I've been going to classes and that makes me more confident at trying to talk to other people like the Japanese staff at work and my language exchange friend, Yukie. I can make whole sentences now! I'm so proud.
We went out at Kei's bar, Kei was a bit twitchy and distracted the whole night because his wife was about to give birth to their first child. We had a few drinks there and then Darius decided he wanted to go to karaoke, so off we set in search of karaoke. Unfortunately the two karaoke places we knew were shut - one of them permanently, by the look of it. It wasn't such a bad thing, I'd sung karaoke in there once before and it looked like a creepy American motel where you'd get knifed on your way to the ice machine, but this meant we were short on entertainment. Iain decided it would be entertaining to get Darius to do silly things, like climbing the pyramid in the middle of the fountain in the town centre. Darius was keen on the idea, even after he'd tripped over taking off his jeans (because the correct fountain climbing attire is a pair of white boxers), and then fell over again, and fell off the side of the pyramid into the fountain. It was funny but probably a bit cruel. We decided to get some more drinks and go the river. We hung out there while Iain tried unsucessfully to persuade Darius to swim across the river (Darius was wise to Iain's tricks by then) and then convinced Darius it would be fun to have a sword fight with the long bamboo poles they borrowed from a nearby boat. Darius managed to crack Iain on the head. "I used to do fencing at school."
"Ow, you could've said."
And strangely enough, Iain ran out of silly things to get Darius to do at that point. We stayed by the river until 4.30 and the sun started to come up and the rain started to come down. I went to bed for a couple of hours before getting up to go back to Nagoya to do the overtime I'd very foolishly said I would do. It wasn't fun.