JLPT hangover

The word of the day is: blah. Yesterday I took a Japanese test. In the test room that seated 100 on this occasion, I was accompanied by 97 Chinese people. Yep, that's right - I was one of 3 people that were non-Asian taking this test. Yes, I counted. I'm sure not all of them were Chinese (probably a few Koreans as well), but all the names I saw on test booklets were Chinese, so I'm assuming the majority of them were. Remember, there's like 1.3 BILLION Chinese people in China alone, and Mandarin is more widely spoken as a mother tongue than English - if you're "one in a million" in China, that means there are 1,300 people just like you!!! So the test started at about 10 and ended at about a quarter past 3 for level 1, which means we got to spend a good 5 hours together. They stared at me a lot when they thought I wasn't looking. I was.

So following the aforementioned hellacious Level 1 JLPT which went down, a bunch of people went out to commiserate... er, I mean celebrate. I was only one of 2 there that sat Level 1, but quite a few people took either 2 or 3 (they count down). Despite a bunch of studying, I have little confidence that I passed, mainly because of the last section. Hopefully, I'm totally off on that prediction, but only time will tell on that one. Anyways, back to the fun part of the evening. They went out to dinner, I wasn't hungry since I just had a couple tuna-filled rice balls an hour before that I brought along, so I just got a beer. Then I had a beer to wash it down with for dessert. After that, we went to the coolest karaoke place EVER, and I'll tell you why. No, better yet I'll show you:

That's right - this place had costumes!! Here we see some guy in his spiffy rhinestone cowboy hat, and that other guy dressed up as the panda (screw names). The panda greatly resembles how I felt after 5 hours in a room with 97 Chinese people and that horrid test - fat, bloated, and with 2 black eyes.













...and here we find 2 young test-takers allowing their youthful exuberance to shine. There was undoubtedly some 80's music playing in the background at this time.

And finally, we have a picture of me giving some loving to one of the girls in the group... I don't think she was expecting that, but whatever.


I didn't really feel so hot about things this morning when I had to wake up and then ride over to where I left my car - took about an hour roundtrip to go somewhere that normally takes me about 5-10mins. to get to. I made it through the day though without passing out on my desk at work, so I consider that a personal victory. Yey me. This message has been brought to you by: "blah." And the letter "C."