Yesterday after school Haruka and I met with Nana and Kana (classmates) and sang karaoke for five hours! Karaoke in Japan is much more popular than in the U.S., because instead of buying your own machine and using it at your house, you are able to rent a soundproof room for the night and have a great time for cheap! It's very simple - to choose either Japanese or English songs we typed in either the artist or song into a little computer. The Japanese style room (sitting on the floor) consisted of a table, karaoke machine, screen and two microphones. The evening was hilariously funny and exemplified the Japanese culture even more.
Another popular activity for high schoolers is to take pictures in photo booths. The booth is much larger than the ones in America, being able to hold about ten people. Any way after we were done taking the pictures, the girls edited the photos. They made our eyes bigger, dyed our hair, choose different backgrounds, wrote messages, etc. When the pictures printed out one of the six shots was sent to each person's phone for them to save.
A fashion trend I've noticed is that everyone has huge cell phone charms! They range from beads to stuffed animals to plastic beer bottles! It cracks me up when I see a high school guy on the train pull out his cell phone and a Hello Kitty charm is hanging off of it. Priceless.
Speaking of that I'm really going to miss watching people on trains - my favorite is someone fighting off sleep. It's entertaining to watch them slip in and out of consciousness, and their head sway back and forth. Many people do fall asleep successfully but I have no idea how they don't miss their stop. Unlike NYC the trains are always on time and are clean. They can be extremely packed, like on my first day to school the train was so filled it was almost painful. At stops people were literally pushing their way into the train. Since then it hasn't been that crazy, but if there is one thing I've learned in Japan it's this: you never know what could happen next.
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