Monday, June 1st

Today was our last real day of class. We had a bunch of presentations including my cultural one. My cultural presentation was about Karaoke. It is insane how much a part of their culture that is. Everywhere you look around here there are Karaoke boxes. It's not the same as in the states though... It's actually a business activity to help build relationships...More about Karaoke later.

After class we had the day free to do whatever we pleased. I hadn't done any souvenir shopping and neither had Ryan so we decided to do that. We headed to our spot, the covered mall on Sanjo Street. We got there without a problem this time, we now know the route well... Kyoto -> Subway -> Karasuma Oike -> Sanjo Keihan, no more getting lost. We found some cool souvenir places and then ended up splitting up to do some more shopping.

I had saved my money to do shopping the whole trip and I finally went into some stores and tried on some clothes...It was crazy. Every store had so many awesome clothes that I wanted. Shopping is a whole different experience there. They don't have just big brands like malls, each store has lots of little brands and designers so the selection is vast. I actually found 2 pairs of shorts that I liked, and I hate shorts. Bottom line is: I could have stayed for a week and just shopped in Japan.

I met back up with the group at the pub a little after 7 for our group dinner. We ordered several big group dishes (on Belmont) so we were all looking forward to a nice meal. The dishes would come out in groups...and each one was like a single portion for one person. It was unrealistically disappointing. We each got about 3 bites of each dish. Man I hate eating here!!!!!

After dinner however, we went to do Karaoke. Now, Karaoke is nothing like a bar in the US. You go to a Karaoke place and you rent a room. You go to the room and there is a TV with booth like seating all around the walls. The room just has seats the TV and a sound system. They brought us little console things that we could choose the songs from. My expectations were pretty low from Karaoke and I didn't think it would be that fun for the 2 hour period we rented.... but come the end of the night, none of us wanted to stop! It was sooo funny and just a blast! We all just screamed our lungs out and had a great time. After that we were all exhausted and headed to bed before our last day... :(