Day 98 (Osaka) : Torikizoku rocks

Torikizoku is probably the cheapest izakaya I've been to in Japan in the last seven or so years. It's not cheap in the bad way though, all the food and drinks that I've tried are really good. The appeal this place has is that everything on the menu is 280 yen or 294 yen with tax, but I always just average it to $3 per order. Tonight was the third time going there and I'm still surprised by how much we can go through without running up a crazy bill.

For example when I went out with the office lady from my school on Thursday the bill was a little over $50 for a few side dishes and maybe two or three drinks a piece. Tonight I had three of their ginormous beers, another huge plus they have, and at least six orders of food. My side of the bill came out to about $12 which is as close to half the last bill as I can get without breaking out a calculator or doing division long hand.

The coolest part was that I got to hang out with some of the new students plus some of my classmates who haven't made it out before. That's good in my opinion because if feels like I was getting sucked into one of the cliques they have going on at the school. I always got invited by the same people with the same people before, so it was starting to feel awkward. It's probably not important since the teachers said that the next placement exam is going to split everyone up. Ideally we would all move on to 2F which says that we are still above average students and that we reached second year in a natural progression since we enrolled.

Some of the students are kind of advanced though so it won't be surprising if the edge into third year status after the next exam. Plus some of the other students are young/lazy and don't study or do well lately so it won't be a big shock if they drop down a few letters or even get stuck in the 1G class that holds all the students who couldn't cut it in the 2nd year category.