Last night was the leaving party of Okawara-san, one of the cute girls on the testing and usability team. We were a little late for the trek up to the restaurant so headed up later with Bo, who had a scruffily drawn map on a huge piece of paper.
We were in roughly the right area when we realised that none of the three of us (an Indian, a Dane and myself) could read kanji, so we couldn’t spot the place anyway. Having decided on some kind of compromise between going to somewhere that said ‘bar’ on the outside and asking someone who looked like they knew the area we were accosted by Kawagishi-san, who, while he can parse the local script, lead us down the wrong alleyway anyway.
The restaurant was quite large and seemed to be some kind of brewery as well, but I think most of that was for show. It took a little while to try to explain to the confused looking waitresses that we were part of a party that had already arrived, but Bo just strolled in anyway.
It was the usual mix of drinking (piicha no biru) and a random collection of finger food delivered over the course of three hours, with members of the party coming and going over the same amount of time.
After a bit of camera geekery, biker bravado and drooling over FairladyZ it came time to move on. Since today was a bank holiday Okawara-san wanted to go on elsewhere (her last day is technically tomorrow) – most people dispersed at this point, it was time for the last train.
The five remaining people talked me into coming along to a club in NishiAzabu, “Its on the way home”, so into two taxis and off to the Muse. Downstairs the bar has a very varied feel to it, with plenty of quiet little corners, a few pool tables, some gambling tables (I didn’t see the game) and some darts machines.
We took our place in one of the nicer corners, but were ejected since you have to pay for that corner (there was a discrete reserved sign on the table). Ok, off to play darts then.
I’ve seen these darts machines around before, but never played one, they’re basically a board with sensors in so it can figure out where your dart landed and score accordingly. Of course this means the darts have to be plastic tipped so they fit with the sensors, they’re dreadfully weighted and hardly fly, never mind aiming.
Tiring of the arrows soon enough we headed further downstairs, an epic journey along a pipe, across a small room with a dancefloor, down some scaffolding while avoiding being blinded by the budwiser sign. It was at least a little more roomy down here, there was a games room in the corner with a snooker table and ping pong (real table tennis, not the computer game).
We all collapsed in the corner after a long day. There was some more geeking about motorbikes and guitars (‘Vino, why do you have 23 guitars?’ ‘Guitars are like women, when you see a nice one you just have to have it’).
Two oclock came and our numbers started feeling the worse for wear, since most of us were working today we decided to call it a day and headed home.