Hit Parade La La La

So, last night was the party at Hit Parade. Because I'm not sure I mentioned it or not, Hit Parade is a club/bar set up in the fashion of the American 60's. Kind of a strange thing to find in Japan (and strangely not uncommon), but it was cool. Also, don't let them find out that you're an APU student. Hurray justified prejudices!

We showed up a bit earlier than we were supposed to, but they let us in anyway. We got a seat and hung out for a bit waiting for people to arrive and got a good look at the decor. Nice open setting with a dance floor and pictures of old American celebrities all over the place. Our section had Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Judy Garland, Cary Grant and a few others that I can't recall. All the waiters had pompadours. It was fantastic.

The place was a tabehodai/nomihodai, so essentially "All you can eat all you can drink". Food was decent, with chicken, fish, french fries, and some Japanese stuff and spring rolls. Also, ice cream. The ice cream was pretty good.

There was a live band that played 25 minute sets then took a 15 minute break for the whole night. I'd hate to have that job. There were two guy leads and a girl who was pretty cute and wearing a go-go girl dress. The non-singing band members were dressed in identical suits with yellow and black blazers, and I totally wanted one. The lead guitarist was awesome. He had this kinda dazed happy look on his face the whole time like he was drunk out of his mind, and he would come out and rip these awesome solos while just standing there smiling and looking around like he wasn't sure entirely what was going on, and then just go back into the corner.

About halfway through the night, the guy who's party we were there celebrating actually left. Boooo. Who does that (other than a certain someone at a certain grad party. Oh snap). So that was a bit weird at first, but we quickly closed the gap and kept onward. We were a dual group, though, and the other half of our group was celebrating a different person's birthday. The girl got absolutely smashed and began stumbling around everywhere, and even fell on me at one point which was awkward. After about an hour of that she just passed out dead drunk for the next 4 hours or so. At about the same time the jerks on that side of the party got all rowdy and ended up getting our drinks cut off for the rest of the night, which is the main point of not saying you're an APU student because then they do that pre-emptively. So that absolutely sucked, cause it was 30 bucks to get in and on top of that I was really thirsty. Stupid Americans.

The band was good, and the ambience in the place was generally enjoyable. There were people on the dance floor that had to come there often or something, because they knew every dance move that the performers were doing and did them along with them. That was odd.

Made some friends, talked with some people, had a good time. The taxi finding process afterward was a bit awkward, but we managed. The birthday girl was placed "delicately" into a cab with her drunk ass self, and then we had to talk another girl who was too drunk to function into going back to campus, but it worked out in the end.

The place was really fun and I'd like to go back, but probably make sure that the people we're there with don't just suck overall.

Also: Technical difficulties. I tried uploading the photos, but it just is NOT WORKING. THey'll be up when I can get them to work.