More Karaoke

Friday evening I went out with a couple of my friends for dinner and karaoke. We were just walking around, looking at shops and vaguely searching for food when, while loitering in a kimono shop, we ran into another of our friends! So, the four of us found a neat little café above street level called the ‘Shinsetsu Café’ which roughly translates to ‘Kindness Café’. It was actually very reasonable and cute, though the menu was rather limited to skillets with various arrangements of noodles, meat and okonomiyaki, always served still sizzling with two eggs on top. The inside was covered in vintage Japanese comics, old signs in English and soccer paraphernalia, and really felt like the kind of place that people just hung out in during the day. After that, we wandered over to a karaoke place that we had heard of, stopping at a comic and comic-related stuff store that was fairly amusingly, and sadly containing a special, limited edition of an anime that I’ve wanted to see for awhile, that was not only really expensive but also the wrong region coding for any machine in the US. But, the karaoke place was fun and reasonable, and we got through quite a few songs before we had to head home, including ‘Nights in White Satin’, ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, ‘The Phantom of the Opera’, and miscellaneous Japanese songs, with one attempt by me to sing ‘Vanilla’ by Gackt. A good end to a Friday, if I do say so myself.
-These karaoke bars are set up for the die-hard fan, with all three meals available at decent prices, showers and enough different activities to satisfy pretty much anyone, I should think.
-It seems that things get less expensive the farther from the open ends of the shopping arcades or the higher above street level that you go.
-I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but prices here almost always include tax, and there is no tipping, which makes splitting a check immensely easier.
-There are post boxes everywhere, both for domestic and international letters.
-They have enormous chrysanthemums here. They're beautiful, in many colours, but the biggest I've ever seen.