It rained ferociously all day today, and I found out shortly after leaving the house that my shoes, which are now ぼろぼろ　from walking miles and miles around Tokyo subways in the course of my working days, have holes in them. Wet, cold feet all day do not make me a happy bunny.

Yesterday (Thursday) I went into work at hour early so that I could leave at 5 in order to meet Hide in Yokohama at 6 to go and look at Christmas presents ♥. We met up in huge confusing Yokohama station in the usual spot, next to Beams (expensive department store) and then went into another department store to look at things for him. When we went to Ikebukuro the previous week to see Red Cliff (Chinese language film with Japanese subtitles - I was exhausted by the end) I'd already seen an Anna Sui purse in Sunshine City which I fell in love with immediately, and as my previous wallet was labelled 'childish' by someone who shall remain nameless, to to mention the fact that it had served me faithfully for two years, I thought it was about time for a more grown-up saifu. So we were looking for things for Hide, who thought that he might want a ring or something. First, though, we went into this men's clothes shop to look at a jacket. Hide tried it on - double-breasted, grey with a hood with fur on it, very cool and looked great on him - and decided to buy it. The shop girl was really nice, had piercings and a tattoo of a butterfly just under her ear (apparently it hurt a lot getting it done). She asked us 「どういうつながりですか？」('What type of connection do you have?') which is a bit of a weird way of asking 'How did you meet?' It turned out she'd been to London and liked Camden a lot, which I could have predicted just by looking at her. He ended up getting the cool jacket for only about 16000 yen, having signed up for an 101 credit card which gave some kind of massive introductory discount. I need one of those...

Hide had this cold which included a pounding headache, so we decided to cut the visit short and go back to his place in Centre Kita, only 20 minutes away. We ate dinner, watched some scary short horror films (from a series called 新耳袋, shin mimi fukuro, which contains about 50 DVDs of super-freaky Japanese horror shorts that WILL NOT BE ERASED FROM MY MEMORY NO MATTER WHAT I DO!!) and then went to bed early-ish.

Work the next day was followed by the company 忘年会, or end of year party. It was OK, but obviously the boss and his wife being there put an inevitable damper on things. It was a bit like eating a rather formal dinner with some older, conservative relativesm, being plied with wine but trying really hard not to get drunk because there's stuff that you've been thinking for three months that you just might out and say by accident... The food was a slightly strange fusion of Indian and Japanese (think curry spaghetti with crab - nicer than it sounds, though undeniably odd) and came in such quantities that everyone ate way too much. Emi, Romi, Yuko and I wanted to do a ２次会, or second round, at karaoke, but all the karaoke places in the vicinity seemed to be full. It's that time of year. Romi and Yuko went home, unfortunately, due to an insanely long commute (Romi) and getting up habitually at 4am (yes, that's right, four in the morning) and therefore being dead on her feet (Yuko) and Emi and I decided to walk leisurely to Shibuya and see if we could get into my izakaya of choice, 月の夢 (of the 1500 yen 2-hour 飲み放題, all you can drink thing). We did manage to get in and were seated at an amusingly tiny table right next to the entranceway shielded from view by a surprisingly effective beaded curtain... but the two of us had eaten so much at the previous place that we literally could not drink alcohol. She ordered a ginger ale and I ordered a Coke. Probably the first time ever that my first round at an izakaya was a soft drink... We had good chat right up until it became ぎりぎり　for the last train, at which point we parted ways in front of the station and I ran for it and just made it. The train was 4 minutes delayed at Shibuya station, which meant that everyone intending to switch on to the Tamagawa line at Tamagawa would have missed the last connection at 00.18 had the station staff not (thank god) held the train for us. Before we reached Tamagawa everyone around me was checking their watches/keitais and muttering things like 'chikusho'. The guy behind me said 'Fuck!' quite loudly - I don't know if this was expressly for my benefit or not.

This weekend is going to be lazy and thrifty, as money is extremely tight given I have to pay Yuki back that 100 000 yen for the ticket to Canada...