The first one

Too many interesting things are happening here to not write them in a public forum. Here goes: Last Thursday night I decided to invite one of the other Sanyo interns to grab a drink at a nearby izakaya (near my apt) called Daisuke-ya, meaning Daisuke's place (boy's name). I went there the previous week with Marshall from San Diego, a hip place with young girls as waitresses in an ultra-hip nouveau take on traditional drinking place. They tried to speak cute English to us. So I met Shirin, a cool Iranian girl studying engineering in Kobe, nearby and we walked past the sign:
"we cook delicately of selected seasonal materials to sublimate the instinctive behavior of eat even to tasty, artistic livel."
That was good enough for us. We had a bunch of drinks and lively chat, and during it all I got a texto message from my friend Phil who I met in Nagano years back. The message was 'forget what I said last time. Got the weekend off, we're going to Fuji Rock Fest after all! Get a sleeping bag, meet at 7am in the morning at the station.' That put me in great spirits, after he'd backed out the week before. Shirin and I paid, and as we did, had a nice chat with our waitress. She''s an English major at Tokyo Christian U., and loves speaking English. She said, "I'm Hiroko. I'm 21." And we exchanged cards and phone #s. She wrote on the restaurant's card: Hiroko Iwashita (21) . An hour later, she sent me a happy texto message. By the way, Iwashita means 'under a rock.'