Drinking with colleagues (Kam Pai 喝采!)

This is where I get the name of my blog. Unfortunately, the URL was taken so I had to be creative with chrisintokyo. This is where you laugh.

On a Friday, I expected most people to leave work early around 3 or 4pm like we did in the States and then get ready for a wonderful evening. In fact, I stayed until 7:30pm and was one of the first people to leave! It was the strangest feeling to me. Friday night, everyone is still at the office, and in fact, meetings were still taking place everywhere! It actually made me feel more comfortable working late knowing that other people were also working late. I don't think I would mind this schedule, especially since most people don't come in till later in the morning anyways, which really is how I like to work. I'm a night owl at heart.

I'm glad one of my colleagues, Adrienne invited me to go out to dinner with him and two other Japanese colleagues. We went to a Brittany restaurant (province in France) and had really amazing crepes accompanied with chilled apple cider. It was nice to just chat outside of a work setting. It's so different outside of the office because the Japanese colleagues really opened up and were so honest. I was very fond of how they "let down their hair" over drinks. At our table, we had French spoken because Adrienne is from France and helped us order, Japanese between the ladies, and English when we all wanted to converge our conversation. Ah, I miss the international-ness so much. I felt like I was at the UN .

Near the end of the dinner, this was the first time I had another Asian woman who asked for more drinks while we're drinking. I hope I don't sound too racist or sexist but when I was in Philadelphia, I was never surrounded with women who could drink so it just surprised me. I get the feeling she could out-drink me....looks like I will need to practice more.

Kam pai!