the long farewell

We've been partying it up every day, so much so that I think we won't leave, but just tease them, so they keep throwing us goodbye parties. It's just too much fun.
Wednesday was my Eikaiwa goodbye party. They showered me with gifts, and we ate and sang karaoke.

Friday was Ben's Eikaiwa goodbye party. They are so much fun, we will really miss them. We started off having dinner at an izikaia (pub). We've both streched our limits on what we consider eatible while in Asia, and I thought we had pretty much covered everything that we might meet while in Japan. However, yesterday provided a new 'tasty' challenge. We had orded yakitori, which means grilled chiken (parts) on a stick. It usually come with chicken cartiledge, which we have tried, and can't quite enjoy. Yesterday's assortment also came with a stick of chicken heart. I had never seen a chicken heart, and have never eaten any kind of blood pumping aparatice. The heart was cut in half vertically, and speared, and tasted.. really good! It was like a tender piece of meat. Ha! conqured that one.

The second challenge came thinly sliced laid out on a white plate. The dark coloured meat was covered in some kind of oil and soy sauce. Most people don't like liver to start with.. how many of you have had it raw? If your first thought was "ug, that would be disgusting" well, your sense of taste by proxy is better than some people here. It was slimy! The taste was kinda non-descrite, but the slimy, won't be swallowed factor was enough to make me gag. I ended up swallowing the whole thing, just wanting the sliminess out of my mouth. the picture shown is just after I put it in my mouth, before I realized that no number of chews would get rid of the thing.

In the middle of the yummy chicken heart and the scary raw liver experiences, was the head of a fish sushi we had on wednesday. Just odd enough to make us laugh and take pictures of it.

The rest of the night was spent in blissfull karaoke. We had a blast, and will dearly miss all of our friends here!