...my star was stolen

Never play 'Mario Party' with your friends! Ever! In fact, never play 'Mario Party', period. Whoever designed that game wanted to see the world burn. Don't give that person the satisfaction!

Anyway, it was the night before leaving Japan. I'd spent the last eleven months living and studying in Nagoya, I'd met some wonderful people and had some amazing adventures. And now it was coming to an end. My flight was going to leave the next morning, I'd already packed all of my stuff, cleaned out my room and almost all of the other exchange students had departed. There was only a handful of us left in the apartments and being there felt... all wrong. Almost like the place was haunted. I felt like I'd just been to several funerals in a row - seeing everybody leave like that, knowing that I might never see them again, knowing that one of the most amazing years of my life was over... It was all too much. I felt numb, emotionally drained and I could tell that the others were feeling it too. So, we had a choice: we could either curl up in a corner and be depressed about everything or we could have one last game night.

Now, back when everyone was still there we had this tradition of getting together every other week and playing some... social games... Not all of them involved drinking! Okay... maybe they did... yeah... alcohol was definitely a part of these nights... I mean, we even managed to turn 'Mario Kart' into a drinking game. But we tried to be civil and most of the time we didn't get too rowdy. Sure, there was a lot of screaming and yelling in Finnish (Finns are incredibly competitive, it seems) but those were our more... civil... parties. Since we were all feeling pretty down the remaining few of us decided to have one more game night, hoping that would lift our spirits.

The night before leaving me, Mary, Tytti, Devin, Claudia and Shodai got together in Devin's room to play some 'Mario Kart', have a few drinks and reminisce. Devin and Claudia were staying for another semester so they had to see all their friends leave while knowing that it would be at least another month before the new students showed up. They were as bad off as me, Mary and Tytti, who were all leaving the very next day. And Shodai, our designated Japanese person, was almost dead. He had a pretty bad cold and a fever but he decided to join us nonetheless. So in short: we weren't the happiest group of people... But we were hoping to change that. 

The night started off pretty well. We had some drinks, played some games, tried not to burst into tears and did a pretty good job. We were all pretty impressed with how Devin managed to organize his room: before leaving most of the old students dumped all their stuff into his room and it looked like a warehouse just a few hours before our little party started. He managed to make the place look good and we had to give him credit for that... until we entered his bathroom and discovered the eldritch horror that was his toilet bowl. I'm not going to get into details but... well... let's just say that it looked like cthulhu had been trying to crawl its way out of it and Devin had crushed his head with a dumbbell. 

To put aside the fact that Devin was angrily scrubbing the toilet bowl and Shodai was slowly drifting into a feverish coma with a can of beer resting on his forehead, I thought the night was going pretty well. That was until we started a game of 'Mario Party'. For those of you not familiar with it: it's basically a board-game in video game format. You roll a dice, move around and collect coins by playing minigames, and get stars... which you can buy using coins. The one with the most stars (and coins) in the end, wins. Now, I've never had the best of luck with board-games and I sucked at the minigames so when I finally managed to get a star, I was more than ecstatic... until someone had the option to steal a star from either me or another player... and they chose me, of course. 

I don't usually get angry but when I do... things go flying. It was my only star! My one and only! As soon as it was gone I let out an angry yell and threw the controller down. Yes, I threw it on the ground. I don't think I'd been that angry in my friends before so they were a bit taken aback... and amused... 

'Oh sure, you take MY star! It's always me! You know how much I suck at this game and still you had to take MINE! You know what, guys? Screw you! I'm outta here!' 

And with that I jumped up and stormed out. Yes. I know. Was I being childish? Yup, definitely. But they had taken my star! Oh, I knew I was being stupid. And to be honest, as soon as I'd stepped outside I realized how ridiculous I was being. But it was already too late. I had to commit, otherwise I would look even dumber. So I stomped off to my room, still seething. 

Thankfully, the certain someone who stole my star managed to catch up to me and actually apologized. After a bit of convincing and a promise not to steal any more stars I was willing to return and continue with the game. For some unknown reason the rest of the game went pretty well for me. Nobody stole any stars from me and people were generally trying to get out of my way. How odd! The fact that I was still sulking a bit made it even easier for me because the others were desperately trying to appease me. 

After a while I did start to feel like my old self again and I felt quite a bit ashamed of my temper tantrum. At some point we decided to go through some stuff the old students left behind... and we found more than we expected. Kitty ears and paws? Golden handcuffs? Who were these people? And why did they have a long furry... Oh... It was a cat tail... Riiiiight... A fake cat tail – part of a Halloween costume. A word of advice: never let a bunch of drunk people get a hold of a long black cat tail. It leads to some... questionable photographs... Yeah, we had a pretty interesting photoshoot, messing around with the props that were left by the old students. It was a great conclusion to a crazy night. For a moment we managed to forget everything that had happened and everything that was going to... We were just a group of friends having fun and messing around – enjoying the time we had left. It was an amazing conclusion to an amazing year, even with all the temper tantrums, angry toilet scrubbing and feverish ramblings of a half comatose Japanese person. Ah, to be young again!