Fireworks, Karaoke, and Conversing with Strangers in Japanese

Alright, so I lied about me being able to update often after I came home...I didn't know I would be lying, I swear! XD See, although JCMU's summer program goes EXTREMELY fast (1 chapter every 3 to 4 days O_O), there still isn't enough time to finish one whole year's worth of lessons in two months. So in order for me to be caught up with the 400 level here at Michigan State, I had to learn 5 chapters by myself, and truth be told, I am not finished. It's really hard to do this alone- any Japanese students out there, I am using the Tobira textbook, and in said textbook, the focus is primarily on the reading material for that chapter, so I have to learn the vocab, learn the kanji for that vocab, learn all the new grammar structures, make sure that's all memorized so that I can actually go back and read the reading material, as well as the conversation practice, cultural notes, and any other things in there. And mind you it's about 60-80 vocab words, over 50 kanji, and about 15-18 grammar structures per chapter. Sorry, this post isn't supposed to be about my work load, it's supposed to be about my last few days in Hikone.
On August first, there was a festival in Hikone right along the beach road which is right by the school. I was really looking forward to going to the festival to cheer me up after the disaster that had been my oral exam earlier that day. Around 6 o'clock, Alex and Alisa came back from a bike ride with lots of food and said there were already stands selling things along the road. I went out with a couple of the guys from my class to get something to eat. I was a bit disappointed, since everything was so expensive, well, relatively speaking. At all the other festivals I had gone to you could get food and drinks rather cheap, but then it felt more like in America when you get ripped off for the prices of food at amusement parks and such. I did end up getting shaved ice though, which you can find at any festival in Japan (if you are looking for some, look for the sign カキ氷, and it's pronounced kakigoori ^_^). By the time I'd bought that though, it was already getting dark since in Japan the sun sets super early, even in summer. 
Alex, Alisa, and another girl Frannie met up and we went to find a spot on the grass to watch the fireworks. The fireworks were launched from platforms in the lake that in the dark looked like battleships XD. The fireworks themselves were great- not only did they have your traditional style fireworks, but being Japan, they also burst in the shapes of other things, like Hello Kitty, Doraemon, Hikonyan, hearts, and smiley faces. Unfortunately it's hard to capture the shapes of these with the camera, even by using special settings (at least for me it is), but I do have other pictures of the fireworks as well...actually, I took like 100 XD, but I'll just post a few here. The show lasted for two hours and fireworks were constantly being launched the whole time. :)

Some of these are the launch boats and some are just boats with spectators

This is the Doraemon one, but as you can see, from our angle it doesn't look like much :P
This is what Doraemon looks like

A great way to end our trip :) The only thing though, was that it meant we got home late even though we had to study for the exam that was the next day T_T.
The next day, I decided since I'd never gone to karaoke in Japan, it was about due time (I know, a travesty, ね?) I had to turn in my bike that day, so I thought it would be easiest to go to the place right next to the station where we had accidentally gone to that time when everyone else went to the other place. Unfortunately, everyone I talked to was being wishy washy about going. I was feeling rather downtrodden because I didn't think it was going to happen. Alex and I did go home to Nagahama to have dinner and such. Alex had plans to meet someone at 9 so she was going to go to Karaoke with us first and then go out. There was a hitch though, and by the time we got to the station, we had already missed the train. We took the next one, which would have arrived only a bit late, but at the major station before Hikone, the train waited there for 15 minutes! I was so mad because I had made a big deal about what time to get at the Karaoke place, and now I was the one who was late. On the train though, a rather strange guy started talking to us but then wanted to meet up with us later and when we told him we were leaving in a few days, he said he would hang out with us in Tokyo...he gave us his phone number, but we never did give him ours...I mean, yeah it's nice to talk to people, but I don't want to hang out with a stranger really, not one who I know nothing about other than the fact that he is in his upper twenties and he happened to be riding the train to Kyoto...
Anyway, we were late, and Alex's friend decided that despite the issues of communication we'd been having with him, that he would meet us up and go with us to karaoke. But he was wasted. And of no help to us. None of us actually knew how to go about this whole karaoke business, and we were very confused. We happened to run across a guy we'd met from Shiga University there and he helped us book the room and get our complimentary drinks and whatnot :). But once Alex, her drunk friend, Ivan, Frannie, and a kid from a different JCMU program named Evan found our room, we had no clue how to work anything. We were given this complicated remote control thing with a screen so we could pick our songs, but we couldn't figure out how to browse through the songs. Alex's drunk friend just sat there not helping us, so it took us about 10 minutes to figure out that you can't really browse through the songs in general, but you have to already know what song you want and just type it in. Eventually we got the hang of it, and eventually the drunk guy left, so we had a ball singing and being goofy for 2 hours until Alex and I needed to leave to catch the last train to Nagahama.

Karaoke in Japan entails you getting a private room with couches to chill at, and we all got complimentary drinks. That touch screen thing that Ivan has is what you use to choose the song and then it'll be on the screen, nicely enough with furigana, meaning having hiragana above or next to the kanji so you know how to read it. I'll go more in depth about that kind of stuff another time if you still don't get it. Even with the furigana, often times to foreigners, Japanese is like a tongue twister when you have to say it fast, so a lot of times our singing came out as gobilty gook XD If you wanna see us be absolute idiots and like, not able to sing in Japanese, I have a video :P We did actually sing another song together pretty well, and luckily it was during that song that our friend from Shiga that helped us book the room decided to pop on in and listen. I didn't film that one though :P.

After we got back to Nagahama, Alex and I hopped on our bikes and were heading home. Nagahama Ootemondoori seemed deserted until we passed a skinny little building with a light on in the upstairs. The sign read that there was a bar upstairs. I was a bit apprehensive since I thought we would be bored and just feel obligated to buy drinks, but Alex wanted to check it out since it was one of our last days in Hikone and also Okaasan knew we would be home late so wouldn't stay up for us. We went in the bar. It was really tiny, but one of the first things I noticed was a corner that had a raised platform with two low tables and cushions to sit on that was sectioned off by bead curtains. After standing at the bar counter for no more than 10 seconds, the people at one of the low tables in the sectioned off area waved us over in permission to use the other table. Alex and I sat down there next to the 3 sorta drunk guys and the 1 rather drunk girl. One of the guys started to speak broken English to us, so we answered in very simple English, but after they asked us if we study Japanese we continued in Japanese from there. And as it went on, they were shocked by the level of Japanese that we spoke. Alex and I didn't really want to pay the prices for drinks (bars in Japan are expensive), but they convinced us to get some, and then they gave us some of theirs, and then somehow we got refills, and all this time, Alex and I are discussing complicated Japanese topics like the Japanese education system and religion in Japan and all these random this we have learned in class. I actually went out of my way to use all the most recent vocabulary structures we'd learned, and they were so impressed by our vocabulary. Alex and I stayed just two hours at the bar, but we'd probably spoken more and better than all of our classroom experiences combined! But too bad that wasn't our final exam instead of the awful awful test we had taken earlier that day. We would have passed with flying colors. Our friends then left the bar and kindly paid for our drinks since they had so much fun talking to us. Alex and I rode our bikes home very elated because of the great night we had had and the fact that we were done with JCMU classes forever :)

Mary

Location: My bed...in my new dorm room that I moved into yesterday :D
Mood: Empty headed (￣▽￣)
Listening to: My Sweet Darlin' - Hitomi Yaida http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIzxrBeKzLA
Japanese for the day: 初めまして、私の名前はメアリーゲビーです。よろしくお願いします。hajimemashite, watashi no namae wa mearii gebii desu. yoroshikuonegaishimasu. - Nice to meet you, my name is Mary Gebbie. I look forward to working with you/ please treat me kindly (something to that regard).
^^this is the standard greeting I use when meeting people. It's not super formal, nor is it informal, and it can be changed depending on if you are the one starting the conversation or you're replying to someone or what not. This is probably one of the most important phrases you can learn, ok?