Tanjoubi Omedetou!

In our parents' age, Valentine's Day must have been "the day" to make babies, 'cause it seems like every other day is someone's birthday around here.

First was mine (I was born two weeks early). It was my 21st, and being American, tradition dictates that I get completely wasted on my birthday. But, seeing as how I am a good, southern girl from a respectable family (and I had class at 9am the next morning), my friends took me to my favorite cafe in Harajuku instead.

A group of us happened upon this lovely European-style cafe on Omotesandou street a couple weeks earlier and we absolutely loved it. A little pricey, but the atmosphere is great and so are the coffees and cakes. I had a cappuccino and scones the first time: soooo yummy! But for my birthday, I ordered a cappuccino (my favorite drink) and a chocolate-banana parfait, or sundae for us Westerners. You can keep your alcohol; give me coffee and icecream and I am in birthday heaven!

A couple weeks later, it was Mark's turn. Mark is a kid from England in my core Japanese course, and though we didn't really know each other, he invited me and my friend Melanie to his 21st birthday shindig: all night karaoke and clubbing in Shibuya.

Twenty-five people turned up at Hachiko for the party! That is a huge amount of people for karaoke, but we were able to find a place that happened to have a twenty-five person room. We payed an outrageous sum for two hours of nomihoudai karaoke, but it was so much fun! People mostly picked songs that everyone knew so we all got to join in and sing to our hearts' content. Some of us even belted out a couple of Japanese songs, including one of my favorites by Utada Hikaru. It ended up being a karaoke-and-clubbing-until 11:30pm party instead of all night, but it was awesome. Cheers, Mark!

And then a week ago, it was Maggie's twenty-first. Again, a Monday, so we decided to go to a cake buffet in Shibuya. That's right, a CAKE buffet. For $15, you get ninety minutes to eat all the cake, jelly, cream puffs, chocolate, and icecream you can. There was also a lovely assortment of coffees and some regular food like pasta and curry, but I was too busy checking out the chocolate fountain to pay much attention. Ask any TriDelta at CMU and they will tell you how much our house digs chocolate fountains.

So there we were trying not to die before we could sample each and every dessert, when an alarm started going off. Then a woman began to ramble happily in Japanese at us over the intercom. Maggie, the group translator, said the woman was thanking us for coming, and then she kept saying something like "quickly, quickly, eat up!". We were highly confused: was the food about to disappear or something? But people started lining up in front of this strange metal box that a worker was fiddling with. And then, as we stared in confusion and the twenty-odd people in line drooled in anticipation, the worker opened the back of the box and pulled out...

a potato.

Turns out, it was a baked potato machine! Everyone was lined up to receive ordinary, white baking potatoes. Tiny ones, too. But they were so excited to get them! I watched the first guy in line ask for four!

We hypothesized that maybe the potatoes had cake baked into them or something, 'cause we just couldn't figure out what all the fuss was about. Baked potatoes. Yum. Bring me more cake!