Christmas party

Tonight was my office xmas party. We had it an Italian restaurant and the food was pretty good. They (the restaurant organizers) swapped out coffee and dessert for an extra 30 minutes of drinking though (open bar). I think I'd have prefered the coffee or tea - I don't drink much anymore. Of coure, that didn't stop me from partaking in...well, I lost count.

I didn't win the dinner voucher that I was hoping to get - it would have come in handy for Kyoto! I could say Cal stole it from me, but he won it fair and sqaure in the draw... especially since I won the first prize up for grabs, a 3000 yen prepaid subway card.

After dinner a bunch of us went to karaoke. I haven't been in so long, so was looking forward to it. Actually someone suggested that the party be non-smoking so no one smoked during dinner and none of the karaoke go-ers were smokers so it was a stink-free evening. It was really nice actually. Usually at parties everyone is smoking and you just reek when you get home. (Japan being smokers' heaven)

So a group of us sang until the wee hours of morning. One of the office staff lives in the same area as I do, so she, someone who was crashing at her place, and I all shared a cab home - we left karaoke well after the trains had stopped. Thank goodness I didn't book in Japanese lesson for tomorrow!

I don't know what package we got a karaoke, but it seems like it was a party deal and we ended up getting all kinds of alcohol and snacks. We originally had two rooms and some of us left to catch last train so we moved down to one room. I grabbed their snacks and alcohol to transfer it over to those of us who were staying. I threw mini-champagne bottles in my jacket pocket, grabbed the super-sized bag of Japanese snacks and grabbed the bottle of sho-chu (kind of alcohol). Well, when we got into the cab coming home, I rediscovered the champage bottles. Ooops. So I made out with 2 mini-bottles of Freixnet. I'll bring them down with us when we go to Kyoto and we can have champagne on xmas eve now.