The Last Hoorah

Crunch time. I was leaving tomorrow, and everybody was nervously packing and cleaning their rooms. Luckily, we discovered a vacuum cleaner in our closed, which had a convenient "tatami mat" setting.

But that's not to say we spent the entire day diligently cleaning. In fact, the first part of the day was more of a wallowing-in-despair and lying around moment. There was a good deal of cleaning ahead of us.

So many dishes

I laid in my corner of the room and let my gaze wander. This wouldn't be the last time I would wake up to this view, but it would be the last time I could just lie here and think in this room.

I wandered around the house, snapped a few pictures.

Trusty bath.

Trusty TP. I guess the next residents won't
have any shortage.

The Post Office

These two wonderful people were nice enough to drive me and the girls to the post office to help us mail our packages.

Sazawa Sensei and Yamanaka Sensei

We all piled into the car with our boxes and mailing forms. The post office we went to wasn't far, but it was on a side of the city I had never been to.

The post office.

I also learned that I could have put several more pounds of stuff in the box and still been under the weight limit for my price range. (That good-for-nothing scale). In retrospect, that would have been really nice to know in advance.

Kilo took this picture of himself with my camera when I was gone.
At first it's funny, then weird, then just plain horrifying.

It was our last day here, so we decided to go to the school and hang out with the students one last time. I was taking an abnormally high number of pictures. I guess I wanted to make sure I got everything.

When we arrived on campus, we all sat around and talked for a while. It sounded like we were gonna go to karaoke again! Huzzah!

We waited for everybody to show up, and then we took off. Coincidentally, the bus we took went by the very post office I had been earlier. That's how I got the pictures of it despite having left my camera at the dorm with Kilo.

Karaoke Night

What happened next was probably one of the greatest nights of my life. We sang, we talked, we drank, and we took lots of pictures.

We couldn't all fit into one room, so the rest of the group was down the hall.

We pretty much all ended up in that room anyway. None of us wanted to be separated.

Our time was almost up, but the previously MIA Christian, Neko-Sean and Jake had just shown up, So I spent about 20 minutes singing with them, too. Sean was the only one who knew some of the same anime songs I did, so we sang a couple together.

We only had about 10 minutes left at this point, so we all sang Bohemian Rhapsody in the second room. It was pretty epic.

Time to go. For many of us, it was our last goodbye, so we spent some time in the karaoke lobby, probably annoying the employees a bit.

Some people hopped on trains to go home, and others followed us back to the dorm, to see us off until the very end. I went to bed a little sad, but excited, because the craziest adventures were still in front of me. Starting Friday, I would be on my own.

The gates at the train station.