Saturday night and we were all anxious to go out. Knowing we had Sunday off, our energy returned after feeling exhausted from days of training. I didn’t realize I had a second wind in me. I wanted to leave the training center even if it was to walk down the street, turn around and walk back. All the girls dressed up, freshened our makeup and prepped for a night in Omiya.

First stop was dinner. Then we found a Karaoke bar. Karaoke in Japan is much different than Karaoke in the states. Here, you rent a room for a couple hours for around $30/person and get unlimited drinks and an assortment of mini snacks including pocky, popcorn, chocolate pieces, some sort of sausage links, chips and peanuts. There were 11 of us so we piled into our private room and sang our hearts out to old school metal, high school hip hop, Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, and for those who could speak Japanese, some J-pop (Japanese pop). I’m pretty sure we overwhelmed our server because we consumed enough alcohol to put the place out of business.  She barely had a minute to rest with our constant request for more alcohol.

After enjoying 2 hours of singing our hearts out, feeling we needed even more alcohol, we stumbled around town looking for another place to hang out. During our quest, the token blonde girl of our group gained the attention from some Japanese boys on the street. Not even kidding, he was wearing a shirt stating, “I love Blondes.” They eagerly wanted to entertain us for the evening, so they brought us to a bar that had unlimited drinks for an hour and a half. I don’t understand the concept of bottomless alcohol here. It doesn’t seem to be easy to order just one drink. It seems you order bottomless drinks or you just don’t drink. It made me wonder if that was just an ‘upsell’ technique geared toward foreigners in attempt at making a profit. At this point, we were all way past our prime and should have gone home 2 hours ago. But we were all wanting to be anywhere but the training center.

After enjoying too much sake, I desperately had to go to the bathroom. The bathrooms in Japan are always a treat. You never know what interesting set-up you will find. This one had a bidet. I was very curious to try it, hearing many good things about it. So I started pushing buttons. Bingo! The cleansing ceremony began, except I not only washed the needed areas, but the power behind the stream was so strong it sprayed my butt, legs and shot up between my legs and saturated the front of my shirt. “Great…how do I explain this?” I thought. Maybe no one will notice?

When I joined the table, the Japanese boys immediately turned, pointed and laughed. They were talking in Japanese, so I had no idea what they were saying, but it was obvious it was about my wet t-shirt contest. Did they really know what happened? So I just laughed along with and re-enacted what happened in attempt to make fun of myself.  

They must have gotten a kick out of it, because I kept hearing ‘kawaii’, Japanese for ‘cute.’ I guess I’ll take it as a compliment, being I’m not blonde anymore.