I Got Bit by a Horse!

That is the email I sent to a friend, and it led her to worrying that I was in so much pain I was no longer capable of forming sentences with proper grammar. In a frenzy of concern, she wrote back asking if I was alright, or was I in the hospital? Was I in pain?

All I had intended to do was make her laugh.

You see, the night before I had gone out with my favourite waiter and two of his friends. (After getting a message utterly out of the blue last week that went something along the lines of, "I love your smile," I decided to take advantage and see if I couldn't convince him that we should hang out a little.) His friends both work out at the local stables where many of the racehorses are kept, and after having begged them for ages to bring him out to look around, they finally relented when they found out I was going to be coming along. After getting only mildly lost on the mountain, my chauffeur eventually got us to the stables, where his friends brought us in and gave us a bit of a tour around, as well as letting us into the stables where we were able to both look at, pet, and take photos with the horses.

Not so much into the photos, I did however enjoy rubbing the horses noses or letting them lick my hand. The last one we got close to was enjoying my hand a great deal -- so much so I started to get concerned and draw back a little bit. It was then one of the guys said, "oh, don't worry. He's not biting or using his teeth or anything." I think the horse understood, and in a moment of perverse pleasure chomped down on one of my fingers right then. And the boy standing closest to me heard it happen, while I refuted the previous blithe statement with, "Well, he is now" and yanked my finger out from the clenched teeth of a 500 kg animal. Great concern about the amount of pain I must be in, I shrugged it off, saying, "actually it doesn't hurt that much." And it didn't. It didn't actually hurt until about 10 minutes later when we were driving around the grounds before leaving, and it continued to hurt all the way down the mountain as I massaged and rubbed it.

It stopped hurting by the time we got to the yakuniku restaurant, but by then, to make up for my lack of pain, it began raining even more heavily than it had been. We sat down around a smoky shichirin and grilled up various bits of animals (livers, intestines, endocrine glands, as well as the regular muscle), chasing it down with heaping bowls of rice and chunks of raw cabbage. As the only non-smoker in the group, and therefore the only one who really wouldn't appreciate the smoke, it all gathered around me as I feebly attempted to blow it away. Although, according to my cute waiter, there is a Japanese saying that suggests the smoke only gathers around the most attractive person in the bunch, at which I laughed loudly and he and his friends all started trying to blow the smoke into their own faces. The drunken chef caught me slipping my escort for the evening nearly three quarters of my rice (as there was no way I was going to be able to eat that much plain rice on my own) and inquired as to whether I was his wife. It seemed to be the day for those kinds of questions, as not only was I asked by the chef, I was asked numerous times at school be several 1st year students, and later by my escorts friends whether or not I had a boyfriend.

After a delicious and filling dinner, it was my turn to take over behind the wheel of the car and cause panic in others, as I now knew where we were going. That, and it was my car. We carried on to DD's for a variety of activities.

It started with a 4 person game of ping-pong, on a round table divided into 4 sections. And had it remained merely a game of ping pong, I have no doubt I would have lost miserably as I am really, really not good at ping pong. My waiter, however, decided to make it more of a challenge by deciding that every time you hit the ball, you had to name a country -- and it could not be a country previously said by anyone at the table. We would go to minus ten points, and the loser would have to buy everyone else a soda. Now this, this I can do. It started off well, with Nobita rapidly getting to minus four points. On a stumble and a miss I wound up at minus one, with Daichi at minus three and my waiter at minus two. With a nod to each other, we decided we would do our level best to make sure it ended up with Nobita, but Daichi rapidly started losing ground in the game, and started taking longer and longer to return the ball. It got to the point where the ball was barely bouncing, and at one point, he even stood bouncing it on his own paddle until he could come up with a country's name. The breaks before services grew longer and longer as my cohorts for the night found it more and more difficult to come up with country names, while I was bouncing on my toes, pleading with them to just hit the ball. When it came down to it, Daichi ended up losing on a made up country, buying us all a soda to relax before we carried on to darts.

Darts. I am not good at darts either. Throwing a ball and throwing a dart are two very different things for me, and in our game of Count-Up, I managed to only lose by a lot in the first game, and then come from way behind to surprise the heck out of everyone - including myself - and get a triple-20 and a bulls-eye in my last turn. Lucky me ended up winning the game, which led to a third and final attempt by those who wished to regain some of their pride.

We should have stopped the night after the darts. But we didn't. We decided to try the bowling as well. Now, I am not usually utterly horrendous at bowling, but this was not my night. In fact, it was no one's night, as not a one of us broke 100 in the first game (in fact, we were hanging around 60 and 70, with a 95 taking the game). The only strike of the night was in my last frame, where I shocked both myself and the boys by actually managing to throw the ball straight, and by following it up with a spare. We started the second game after that, against all our better judgement, and ended up quitting halfway through. Oddly enough, we did not ask for a print-out of our scores, as spectacular as they were. If we were being generous, we could blame the aborted second game on the fact that Taichi and Nobita had to get up at 4:30 the next morning for work, and by this point it was already 1am, but that would be a lie. A blatant lie intended to preserve self-respect.

I drove my waiter home, and got a handshake for my troubles (I remember the first time I went out with Dave, and I left him with a handshake at the end of the night; I made up for it on the second date, but I now understand how disappointed he probably was by that), as well as loads of enthusiastic waves and excited good nights, bending down again and again to wave good night through the side window, as well as waving while crossing the street, when he may have been wiser to be making sure there was no traffic coming.

All in all, an extremely fun night, despite getting bit by a horse.