I spent Friday night in the most splendid Izakaya I have yet to enounter. It was pricey, of course, but the atmosphere was super-East-Asian and fantastic (which means, in addition to the conventional implications of good-atmosphere, that it was at least 80 degrees in there and the beer was flowing like wine and the wine was flowing like honey). The event was a late-New-Year's party thrown by a friend of a friend, and the patronage was largely Japanese, which allowed me to practice some of my newly acquired language "skills" and try some new foods and drinks -- i.e. the biggest plate of do-it-yourself king crab ever invented. I also mastered a Japanese tongue-twister in true nomi-hodai fashion:

Nama mugi
Nama gome
Nama tamago

or something like that. Three times fast. I forget what it means, though. Alas.