For Queen and Country

I hadn't heard too much of Saint George to be honest, much less the day named after him, beyond the little picture of him on the side of my beer bottle. I still don't really, aside from the fact that he makes for a mean excuse to run around Kobe with a camera looking for creative interpretations of the word "corgi".

The true Japanese experience

The work party on Friday night was actually a bit better than I expected, if only for the sake of change. Rather than things disintegrating into karaoke and whiskey (not that there's anything wrong with that), we ended up at a classy bar drinking out of absurdly big wine glasses and being served cheese and chocolate by the Japanese equivalent of Eric Clapton in a waistcoat. This was the first chapter in a recent trend of doing very non-Japanese things. Somewhat ironically, after spending a lot of my downtime last weekend playing a game where you aim to exterminate mankind with a new virus, I've found myself struck down by another doom flu. It's really not doing much for my sense of adventure wanting to leave KFC.

The sweet taste of victory

As far as the weekend goes, this post is exactly what it says on the tin. We won a pub quiz. We ate a lot of desserty things the next day. This is about as clever as I can be on a Tuesday morning. I may still be suffering from the aftershock of my sugar crash.

Himeji hanami hangover hilarity

"We'll need to get the train at about 10 to get to Himeji on time", Lisa's message ominously warned in the wee hours of Saturday morning. This would probably have been a good time to go pay up and go home, but having another whiskey and bellowing out "Pretty Woman" seemed like a much better idea.

It wasn't. Or was it? By this stage, not even my hindsight could see straight.