Tiffin Reunion – part 2a [Karaoke]

Saturday 12th May, 6pm; I get a call from Emily, who’s gotten in to Narita and gotten the 7pm bus to Le Meridien, Odaiba. So, at 8pm I trot over and pick her up. It’s all rather surreal seeing her in Tokyo; and it seemed an age ago when she organised the whole thing.

We rush her and her bags back to my place then get ready to go out to Shinbashi to meet the other Brits and some of my friends for some Karaoke madness. We are actually a few mins late, but the logistics of getting everyone to meet in front of the statue of a train outside the station is proving a bit of an issue, as I’m bad at describing where it is, and no one else knows where it is. After much calling and emailing, we get everyone together, apart from the UK contingent who aren’t so contactable via phone and were having issues with finding the place too.

Anyway, we then head down towards some large karaoke signs and I let Marie do all the talking. Unfortunately, the whole of the street that we are on don’t do nomihodai (all you can drink, in an alcoholic sense) but we go in anyway, we’re up on the 5th floor in a little booth numbered 53. The room…ohmygod…the room has wallpaper which looks like it’s been regurgitated by a very sick, radioactive animal; there are even some lovely looking luminous lines tracing their way around the walls adding to the effect. We pile into our room designed for about 10 and park ourselves on the little bench which lines the edge of the room facing the very large and looming karaoke machine. There is a low table taking up the rest of the space in the room which is equipped with various karaoke implements: the wireless touch pad used to select and queue your desired song, a pair of maracas, 3 tambourines, two microphones, and most importantly a menu for al-ki-hol! There is also a communication device on the wall (known as a phone) to order your drink. So it’s all good.


So! What to do, you’re stuck in a room with a karaoke machine and several people who don’t know each other and are thus nervous. I was forced to sing first, despite my feeling of DEATH and my lovely sore throat. And I have to say I was AWEFUL. We force a couple more songs while people get into the swing of things. I was trying to convince Is to sing but she was having none of it, apparently some alcoholic lubrication was required. THEN, we made Annalisa chose a song (she was complaining that she didn’t know any of the things we were singing and demanded some thing more from her time!) and that girl can sing, and sing well. I actually thought it was the karaoke machine that had a voice for you to sing along with, but no, it was actually Annalisa singing. Everyone else kinda stopped singing as not to ruin Annalisa’s good work. After a couple of drinks, even Ian and Is got into it, which was good to see. It was hard to believe that we’d passed 2hours in there and was more fun than I thought it would be; which was cool.


At midnight we paid our tab (which was rather healthy actually despite the number of drinks we had) and all hurried to the station to get our last trains home.