Yet another good bye party!

Tonight we had an English teacher-exclusive farewell party for Mrs K. It was quite sad to be saying good bye, but it was a really nice restaurant and the food was excellent.

When we first arrived they sat us next to a table full of drunk business men who we could only just see through the cigarette smoke surrounding them, but then a waiter offered us the coolest table in the restaurant.

You had to go through a mini door to get to it and inside there was a table with sofas either side, but the room was rather trapezoidal so the sofas started by being almost too small to sit on at one end, and by the other they had been padded out with several cushions just to make sure you were close enough to the table to hear the conversation.

The door was actually a bit of a hazard. Later on all four members of our group virtually knocked themselves out on it when going to the loo and the waiters had some near misses too. It had a bit of an Arabian feel to the decor and if it had been any darker we would have needed a torch.

I think the lighting effect was an attempt to hide the fact they were feeding us raw fish. Most of the food was really good; beef salad, chicken and aubergine stir fry, smoked salmon, fried rice and so on. but then out came the sashimi...and it was shrimp. I have nothing against shrimp, especially as it is one of the few pieces of sushi that is actually cooked! But this shrimp had head, tail and legs all still attached. It looked at me from the plate with a little smile on its still present face. I couldn't eat it. I picked at the raw tuna and eventually smuggled the offending article to the person next to me. Luckily by this point we were quite a few cocktails into the evening and nobody noticed or cared.

In fact the only downside to the evening was that Mr T forgot to bring the good bye card. I had gathered together her favourite students and we had written a lovely big card in English with stickers and pictures all over it, but then he didn't remember to bring it. Of course I was very gracious about the whole thing.

By 9 o`clock the conversation had degenerated into bitching about co-workers in rapid Japanese so I headed for the train.