You've got white on you

Home sweet home (Katsuni "Mansion")
Disclaimer: This post is not only essentially a diary entry and thus potentially not entertaining, but it talks about the weather.

It snowed like the coming of the four horsemen in Osaka today. Woke up to find careening out of the sky like the unfortunate blue whale in Hitchhiker's Guide. This may not be news for some, but for me it was being woken up by a puppy or my first bike. Every time I've been anywhere near snow, it’s been somewhere I have gone to. I.e. I've been to snow, but snow has never really come to me. But in this case we had sheets of it piling itself outside my front door. And these weren't mere snowflakes. They were frozen precipitous guerrilla warfare. Assault teams of snow. Snow that should have kung fu sound effects dubbed over when it collided with the ground and innocent bystanders.It didn't let up all day – must be at least 12 hours of snow so far, as I write this from a train heading to Mie. It wasn't snowing when I rolled in at 4am, after my average Friday night. Seems I've turned into a bit of a Pure whore. For those of you playing the home game, Pure is an all-you-can-drink hip-hop club in central Osaka (Namba, near Dotonbori). It opened sometime in 2005, and it's probably the most reliable club in the South in terms of pulling a crowd on Friday and Saturday nights. Yes, they play hip-hop. No, it's not a perfect world. But-all-you-can-drink means as long as you bring a handful of other mates and it's not entirely packed out (Saturday tends to be a bit too like sardines for me), you can have yourself a fun ol' night. Did I mention it's all-you-can-drink? Well, for 30-35 bucks (dependent on your gender), so you have to make it worth it. My failsafe-so-far drinking method in order to maximize my money's worth works in a shot-chaser double punch, in fairly rapid succession. It's necessary to wipe away the sadness that you’re not in a club that has the potential to drop a Pendulum or Digitalism track.

An average night at Pure:
- Beer (Corona or Kirin)
- Shot of tequila
- Beer
- Tequila
- Sex on the beach or Red Bull + Vodka
- Tequila
- LA Water* or RB+V
- Sambuca
- LA Water
- Sex on the beach (or Coke, if I've had enough)
Total retail value: $50.00
(You save lots!)

There's no way I could fit 10 cocktails in – the sweetness and volume of liquid would make me feel ill. Usually 4 shots of anything stronger than Kristov would have me conversing fervently with the toilet seat (Tequila is easy to shoot, but it tends to be slow-release and screws me up a few hours later), but for some reason this works well. It might be the lemon. Certainly the only time I felt nauseous all last evening was after the Absolut Vanilla shot I had before we arrived. Something about the taste of vodka triggers something in my vomit gland. I don't tend to lose it, but it puts me in a bad way for a bit of the evening.

Anyway, the snow. All that white fun and noone to share it with! Most people my age find snow either boring or inconvenient. People carry umbrellas through town and stay in sheltered areas as though it was raining. Meanwhile, I put my headphones on, ran up on the roof of my apartment and danced while the sky painted my coat white. It originally wasn't cold enough to pile up, but the stubbornness of the snowfall (like lemmings off a cliff) was enough to put a good amount on the ground.
Then I made a friend.



I love summer, but there’s nothing like snow to make everything seem beautiful.

Suggested snowfall enhancing music:
- Coldplay, esp. Square One
- Royksopp, esp. In Space (jeez this reminds me of Lexx)
- Stars
- Mylo, esp. Valley of Dolls
- Underworld, esp. Glam Bucket or anything from The Oblivion Ball

More pics of childish excitement on Flickr