Wild Women's Night Out

The weekend is well over, but we had a great time. Well, I did, anyway, since I got together with a few of "chicks" in my company and we had a day and a night out in the exotic city of Hamamatsu. Though situated in conservative Shizuoka Prefecture, Hamamatsu is actually a pretty robust city full of life - and the spice of life, too, as it has a high foreign (non-Japanese) population.

There was a Brazilian/ Samba festival going on that day, and we wanted to see some of the dancers. The general meeting time was 5 p.m, but three of us decided to go early for a little window shopping -which, actually, turned into a few hours of drinking shouchu-mizu-wari at a local bar. Shochu is a Japanese alcohol; shochu-mizu-wari （焼酎水割り)　is shochu with water. Kind of like vodka and water...I'll post later about the benefits of shochu! Anyway, a 2 p.m. start to the shochu drinking made for an interesting night!

After becoming mildly inebriated, we then met the rest of the gang for Samba, dinner and karaoke in the biggish city. Here are a few photos from our night out:

Hamamatsu folks are more appreciative of the fine art of tatoos. This guy liked my dragon, and we ended up comparing tats. He won!



The Samba girls were fabulous - really engaging, and even the older Japanese folks around were delighted:


We made it to the karaoke box (2 hour nomihodai (all you can drink)) and the karaoke fiends among us stole the show:


Not to be outdone, though, I did screech out my version of Def Leppard's Animal (much to everyone's chagrin...):



Following such tiring activity, we retired to Baden Baden, (named after the famous German town, of course) a 24 hour onsen / minshuku in Hamamatsu.

A good time was had by all....