Saturday Night Fever

It's taken me less than 12 hours in Japan to sing karaoke and I'll give these guys credit for how much fun it can be. After an afternoon nap (which only encouraged the jet lag!) we caught the train back into Osaka station to meet Tom's American friends Vince and Tom (Vince should probably change his name to Tom hey?) and went out to get something to eat. Pizza wasn't what I had expected to eat coming to Japan but I'm not complaining and the Americans were good company. Apparently in a number of the restaurants you can pay for 90 or 120 minutes of "drink all you want" rather than paying for individual drinks but I didn't think nursing a hangover would be a suitable look for this morning so opted against it for now! I'm not sure what the area of the city was called but it reminded me of Carnaby street in places as it was traffic free and full of interesting little streets and shops and its definitely somewhere I'm going back to. After eating we went into the arcade next door and its pretty much how I imagined it to be - japanese guys absolutely nailing "Guitar Freaks volume 4" and "Dance Dance Revolution". I played a cool game called Pop Music Party which is a rhythm based game where you just hit the right buttons at the right time (Parappa The Rappa anyone?) and watched someone getting a near perfect score on DDR and then getting out towels to mop his sweat from the floor. Outside a large crowd had gathered to watch someone else on DDR and it's crazy how good these guys were at it.

Karaoke is big in Japan and just standing in the entrance of this place showed you how diverse a crowd you'd get at 9pm on a Saturday night - as we had groups of younger people mixed with wasted middle aged women and then Japanese couples. We had a little room with a table suitable for six with a flat screen at one end, a media player at the other and then a huge book full of different songs to pick. Tom had told me before that they had the more well known pop-punk bands like Blink-182 but I never expected to be able to pick songs from bands like Pennywise and Cute Is What We Aim For. I was nervous as I'd never sung in front of a group of people I didn't know before but eased into it was "Feeling This" by Blink with Tom, and then ventured out by picking Jimmy Eat World's "Sweetness" (Are you listening? woh-ohh-ohh-ohhh-ohhhhh), New Found Glory's "Truth Of My Youth" and Green Day's "Waiting". At least I wasn't the only one who couldnt sing to save his life though! I was half tempted to go with Ben E King's "Stand By Me" as it's my favourite ever song but I didn't want to massacre that on my first night and I'm sure I'll get round to it this week!