Anna in the donut

... As in, the Japanese 'ana', a fun new pun I learned last night at dinner, from a very drunk Japanese man whom we invited over to join our table of a very non-Japanese group (he was the only other person in the establishment, besides thechef). We ended up at this hole in the wall place, definitely more Izakaya than restuarant, expecting very little because the place we originally wanted to eat ran out of rice. I know, how the hell can you run out of rice in Japan, you may think, but the place is run by an old couple and they close at 9pm. It was 8:30. Our friend who was enjoying her after-dinner smoke outisde and witnessing our dejection directed us to a place around the corner with flashing lights outside. It turned out that, around the corner, there were actually two restaurants with flashing lights outside (gotta love it) and so we went to the closest one (with the most pictures because out of the six of us, only three of us spoke enough Japanese to communicate).

The food was decent, I had カレー饂飩 and it did not dissappoint.
Hirosei-san, as we later learned, really liked 留学生 because his daughters once studied abroad also, so he said that he felt close to us. He was warm and tried to make jokes about the plane landing in the Hudson river, and kept sending over beer and food, telling us not to hold back if we wanted anything else. We were stuffed with beer and fried things and so we decided to go home. We thanked him sufficiently and made our way home.
On my way home, I was refliecting on what a lovely and satisfying night I had had in Japan when, suddently, this beautiful, long-haired dirty blonde daschund started leading his owner across the street towards me. He became so excited with me that he ran around my legs and captured me! The owner apologized and set me free but Kikka or Kikko (I forget) kept showering me with attention, jumping up to me and being generally really adorable. It was all too unfortunate that my curfew was in 10 minutes so I had to leave my new friend (the seminar house doors are locked at 11pm).
Hopefully I have many more nights like this one.