Hey guys. I am back from my weekend in Atami where I celebrated my 23rd birthday with seven of my housemates. Thank you to everyone who sent birthday messages and a special thank you to those of you posted Dairy Milk (you know who you are). Also thank you to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for the 100,000 yen coronavirus payout and for making my birthday weekend a nice long, four-day public holiday, without which none of the festivities would have been possible.

At eight o’clock on Friday morning we left our sharehouse in Tokyo and bundled onto a train to Yugawara, a peaceful seaside town in the Shizuoka prefecture. It was both a hilarious and exhausting weekend. Between the eight of us, we definitely have some characters. I am the only native English speaker, then there are three Japanese people: Reishiro, a crazy salaryman and Mami-san and Miki-san who are both very kind-hearted Japanese girls with limited English. Then there’s Fatou from France, ShinYu from China and Andre and Diogo, the Portuguese cousins. See the picture above for a visual representation of the gang.

Over the course of the weekend, everything from deciding what we were going to do, where we were going to go and how we were going to get there took an age. Firstly, Miki-san’s shoes held us back by quite a bit. Reishiro advised her in Tokyo not to wear heels but as it turns out they are the only shoes she owns. We lost Miki-san about five times per day, usually just walking from the hostel to the station or the lunch restaurant to the beach. We never passed through a set of ticket gates at the station without someone pointing out that Miki-san was no longer with us. We would sit and wait for a few minutes then sure enough Miki-san would trot around the corner, taking the teeniest steps imaginable in her kitten heels.

The topic of deciding where to eat also created some divisions. ShinYu’s priorities were: nice food, doesn’t care about the cost. Andre’s priorities were: cheap food, doesn’t care about the taste. The overlap here was marginal. Add six other hungry holidaymakers and you have yourself a standard nightmare.

I always sided with ShinYu. This was mostly because it was my birthday, I wanted to go somewhere nice and Andre’s favourite restaurant is McDonald’s. It was also slightly because Andre and I have had our fair share of tiffs in the past (mostly caused by his aversion to feminism). Anyway our disagreements on gender equality were put aside for the benefit of the holiday. Unfortunately, a few more popped up on the topic of food. In Tokyo, Andre eats one meal a day – a huge plate of cooked meat at about eight o’clock in the evening. In Shizuoka, he was not keen on splurging on both lunch and dinner. Luckily, his cousin Diogo kept him in line and Andre trailed behind us as we dragged him from seafood restaurants to noodle bars over the course of the weekend.

No conversation on the topic of where we were going to eat took place in advance. It was only once we were all tired and hungry that we decided we should probably find a restaurant. One of these stress-inducing, last-minute decisions led us to the worst restaurant in the world: Atamisoba.

It was 8pm. It was dark. We were sticky, sandy and hungry. Fatou wanted seafood. Andre wanted McDonald’s. Restaurants were closing and the pressure was building. We had to find somewhere that could seat eight fast. The general consensus was anything but McDonald’s. Walking back on ourselves to find the restaurant we had turned our nose up at ten minutes ago, which was now our only choice, we found ourselves in Atamisoba.

We made our way inside and put in our orders for varying bowls of hot and cold soba noodles. Behind the counter was a grumpy, overweight man who frustratedly rolled his eyes on our arrival. Reishiro politely asked if he could seat us all and he reluctantly said yes. Really, he couldn’t. Andre and Diogo perched at the window, Reishiro ate standing at the counter and the rest of us crammed around the only table on makeshift stools.

We went into the toilets to wash our hands and Mr Atamisoba promptly yelled at us for going into the bathroom at the same time. Fatou wanted to eat fish and every time she put in her order, he would say “sorry, that’s going to take a long time to make.” Before she could say that she didn’t mind, he was ignoring her and serving someone else. Diogo already had his dinner before Fatou had even ordered hers.

This created more problems because Diogo was waiting for us to start. Mr Atamisoba took it upon himself to shout across the restaurant that Diogo started eating as he wanted to get rid of us as soon as possible. He then turned to Reishiro at the bar to tell him in Japanese how much he hated foreigners. Reishiro gladly translated for the rest of us to hear.

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My soba noodles came in the tiniest puddle of sauce. Seeing as he had a whole jug of it behind the counter and no other customers to serve, I asked if I could have some more. He addressed Reishiro in his response and the reply came back that no, I’d had enough. ShinYu sat glaring at Mr Atamisoba and was so disappointed with her meal that she walked out to get chicken nuggets instead. At the end of the meal, we took our plates over to the counter and thanked him. In return, he passed me a damp and dingy cloth and told me to wipe the table. We walked to the station in a state of bewilderment at what we had just experienced.

Once we had taken the train back from the beach in Atami to Yugawara, we went to 7-11 to buy alcohol and snacks because we were going to have a ‘drinking party’ in the hostel. As the eight of us walked into the convenience store, whispers began to spread that Reishiro would be treating us all to a snack and a drink of our choosing. Excitement started to build as Fatou confirmed that we could each put a tinnie and a chocolate bar or a packet of crisps into the shopping basket. It honestly felt like we were little children trying to sneak extra treats into the trolley.

There were various echoes of “Reishiro, can I have an icecream?”, “Reishiro, am I allowed two snacks instead of a drink?”, “Reishiro, am I allowed two tinnies and two snacks because it’s my birthday tomorrow?” to which Reishiro was happy to oblige. We crowded round the till like excited children as Reishiro whipped out his Amex. Outside in the car park I thanked Reishiro for his generosity as I tucked into my choc ice. “I am the oldest,” he explained. I pointed out that Miki-san was in fact five years older than him. Miki-san walked towards us and Reishiro gave her a quick glance before announcing to the rest of us, “yes, but my salary is more.”

Back at the hostel, we drank our tinnies and played the post-it note game (where each person has the name of a celebrity stuck to their head and has to ask questions to figure out who it is). The shortlist of celebrities at the evening’s drinking party was Shinzo Abe, Eron Musk and Ema Wotoson, to name a few. I won the first round although I was the only native English speaker so I was definitely at an advantage. I also asked much more effective questions, such as “am I a woman?”, “am I an actress?”, “am I English?”, whereas Mami-san’s first three questions were “do I live in a forest?” (no), “do I own a house?” (unsure) and “am I crazy?” (we couldn’t agree on this). As expected, the results of which left her with most of the world’s population. Miki-san’s first question was “am I Japanese?”. We told her yes and then when her turn came round again, she thought for a few minutes before asking once more: “am I Japanese?”

I unfortunately lost the second round as their responses meant that I was guessing a British male comedian, who was definitely a real person although they were sure he had died. The answer turned out to be Mr. Bean.

On Saturday (my birthday) we went to Atami Castle. This was not at all what I was expecting. From the outside it looked like a typical old-fashioned Japanese castle. Inside, there were a few Samurai swords and armour, an outdoor foot spa and a screeching, neon arcade in the basement where all the games were free to play. The arcade gave me a bit of headache so I spent half an hour at the foot spa, which had beautiful mountain views whilst the others played Mario Kart.

Next door to the castle, was the Atami Trick Art Museum. See below for pictures of what this entailed.

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After the castle, we had a pit stop for lunch, a quick visit to the shrine and stopped off at the supermarket where we (Reishiro) bought a cake, two bottles of cava, a watermelon and a lot of sushi. On Saturday evening, Drinking Party Part 2 commenced. We ate, played card games and Reishiro sang me an alternative rendition of happy birthday. For the second time on the trip, we played our favourite game, Suica-Wari. (Suica means watermelon in Japanese.) The first time we played was on the beach and basically each person takes it in turns to be blindfolded and then they attempt to smash up a large watermelon with a baseball bat. On Saturday night, we did not have a baseball bat in the hostel room so we instead fetched a large knife from the kitchen, which a blindfolded Reishiro hacked his way through.

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On Sunday morning, we went to the Atami Museum of Art (MOA). The MOA was beautiful and a perfect way to spend a rainy morning.

The rain cleared up later in the day so we spent the afternoon on the beach. Knackered, we later took an evening train back to Tokyo.

Thanks for reading. I’ll be accepting belated Dairy Milk parcels in return for this riveting read!