YMCA Charity Ball & Ueno Zoo

Taqvi and Spence (looking suave)
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On Friday night the trainees were lucky enough to get tickets to the YMCA Charity Ball. This was a swanky black tie affair was being held at the Tokyo American Club (an equally swanky establishment). So having escaped work in plenty of time we put on our glad rags and headed down. Apparently black tie dos are quite rare in Japan, which probably explained why Charlie Brown was bowing so low, he literally had his head on the floor as Cooper left the apartment and went to hail his cab outside the Kitano Arms.

Introducing the representatives from Linklaters...
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I think we were the youngest table there and certainly the liveliest. In fact our dancing was commented on by various other attendees, married woman (who loved the boys) and the band! It was nice to finally get a decent meal as well. I'm starting to get tired of rice/noodles/scrag end meat combinations. The party moved on to Muse, Geronimos (the infamous shot bar) and Gas Panic - standard.

Charlie Brown was bowing so low, he literally had his head on the floor

Karen and the Toole-meister
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Having written off most of Saturday due to the effects of excess alcohol consumption on the Friday night we decided to take it easy and head down to Ueno Zoo. The main highlight was supposed to be the pandas, but given that there was only one and it was trapped in a tiny concrete cage (as were most of the animals) it wasn’t that exciting. I think the highlights were the Japanese Macaques monkeys which seemed to be the only animals actually enjoying themselves!

Realised how little I have achieved this weekend, except boozing at Geronimos and Gas Panic so will hopefully have something more interesting to write next week!

Me & Coops
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In other news, my Japanese lessons are going well so far. I now have a repetoire of approximately 5 words, althought the most overused word so far is probably "sumimasen" which means sorry. It is used in almost any situation or at the start of a setence which you will inevitably continue in English.

This week we were taught how to give directions when in a cab. Cab drivers in Tokyo (unlike London) literally have NO knowledge of where anything is in Tokyo - despite all having up to date SatNav systems in their cars (which they never use). As such, you usually need to know where you are going and be able to direct the taxi driver. Cooper queried with the teacher why the taxi driver never seemed to go where he was directing him. It emerged that rather than saying the correct word for "straight on", Cooper was actually using a word which translated to mean "horse-shit"!