Relationshipless? No problem!

As I’ve said before, I don’t have a boyfriend <because the love Gods are still working magic for me to meet a special someone this year haha>, (please check out my Izumo Taisha blog post about going to the love shrine so you can also pray to the love gods. You can find it here ;))

If you have read some of my previous blogs, you know that I live in two cities half the time. I switch places every week~ Unfortunately, Valentine’s Day fell on a day when I wasn’t in Tanabe, so I couldn’t do a Galentines with the girlies. On top of that, my work schedule between lessons and my graduate courses made it impossible to go on a Valentine’s date in Osaka on the actual day. Soooo I was at a loss for what to do since I wanted to do something this year, but luck would have it that one of my friends would be in Tokyo at the same time I was going.

By chance, I happened to be in Tokyo for a day and needed to kill about 5 hours and one of my friends was in town for work. (I swear I didn’t hold a gun to his head, he was all for it when he heard he could have the girlfriend experience). I recommend if you’re feeling down in the dumps about not having a date for Valentine’s Day, don’t! The right person for you will come along when the time is right. Make the most of your Valentine’s Day by spending it with loved ones or good friends and family.

Sweet Start to a Sweet Day

We started off our date at seven in the morning. We went to a nice little café in the Ikebukuro area where we were able to get a lovely meal. I wanted something that gave off a Valentine’s Day feeling so I chose this cute strawberry set that we shared together. (I say share but he ate about 70% of the meal since I wasn’t hungry haha.) I believe that the perfect way to start off a sweet day is with sweets so I couldn’t have been happier though.

Love Letters?

I wanted to give my friend a little bit of the girlfriend experience, so I prepared cookies and a love letter. I joked around and told him that they were handmade, which is what I would’ve done if he were my boyfriend. He basically got the friendship version of these things with Store-bought cookies because I also didn’t have enough time to bake before going to Tokyo along with a cute letter thanking him for meeting me for the day. 🙂

A Day of Winning

Let’s just say one of the reasons we’re friends is that we’re both very competitive. Our competitiveness in messages about who could beat who at switch games translated into games that we could play at Round One during our date. Let me just say, I got my butt handed to me in almost every single thing we played. There was no love on the game battlefield.

Drums The first game we played was the Taiko game! I LOVE this game. Even though he has only played a few times, he was a champ and played on the difficult level on every song. This was the only game I won at the whole day haha.

Ping pong? I would’ve thought he played professionally with the way that he demolished me in the game. Give or take, I’ve only played ping-pong about two or three times in my life, but I was substantially bad compared to him.

Darts? I never met someone who could hit every mark on the dartboard when playing cricket. He also rubbed salt in the wound by saying that he hadn’t played very much (The guy is good at EVERY thing he tries. LITERALLY). He said he had only played about a handful of times and he just so happened to be good at it. I will say that I won the first round when we played 501. But the only reason we stopped playing after I lost a lot of times was because we had to go to karaoke. I would’ve had us playing all day until I won if time permitted it haha.

Karaoke? Not only could he rap Eminem songs FLAWLESSLY, but he was also great at being the Troy to my Gabriella when we sang High School Musical songs. It was my first time going to karaoke with him so I was fully surprised and excited that he could sing English, Japanese, and Chinese songs. As a karaoke lover, my heart was racing. ドキドキ！

Purikura

 

Despite many losses that I suffered throughout the day, one win was with our purikura pictures. It was his first time taking pictures with a purikura machine, so I had to take the lead on most of it. Even though it was his first time, he was a natural and he really got into it!

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Overall, our early Valentine’s Day celebration was so much fun. I honestly believe that all you really need to feel loved is good food, good company, good laughs, and maybe even a few good games haha. I’m lucky that my friend was so kind and patient even when I couldn’t navigate the city and messed up when reading the Japanese prices for things. The biggest shout out goes to Ervin for being the best fake Valentine’s date a girl could ask for. If you’re ever looking for date ideas, I suggest doing everything we did for our date as we had so much fun and didn’t want it to end.

Valentine’s Day is approaching quickly, so make the most of it by doing something you really like! If you’re a bit down in the dumps about it, don’t look at it as Singles Awareness Day, but rather as a day for you to enjoy with friends, eat deliciously themed food, and after some time, to get chocolates at a discount price.

Have a wonderful and love-filled Valentine’s Day!