St Patrick's Day in Tokyo

I'm sorry it's taken me so long to write about St Patrick's Day. The last few days have been crazy. I've been working and meeting up with cousins visiting Japan and sorting out my tax return and giving notice on my apartment.
That last one was kind of a major milestone. It means I'm really leaving. I will no longer have a place to live in Japan come mid-June. I've had a love-hate relationship with my apartment. It's old and crumbly, and the ceilings are too low, and you need a special knack to get every appliance to work. But it is cheap and spacious and homely, with a great positive energy and lots of light, and it has put a roof over the heads of many happy visitors. I'll be sad to say goodbye to it.
Meeting up with my cousins over from Ireland has been so great, too. Family is family - I haven't seen these people for YEARS, but they were so interesting and so easy to get on with and we shared so many mannerisms and turns of phrase. I guess there's a lot more to be said for the power of DNA than I had realized. Plus, I've been spreading the joy of karaoke to new converts. I might be showing you some videos. Perhaps even a bit of Danny Boy. Try to hold back the tears.
The big event on Paddy's Day this year was the illumination of Tokyo Tower. Usually it's a dull orange, but for one night only the tower got a taste of the shamrock and glowed a beautiful emerald green. It was like a spaceship had landed in the centre of the city.
I met friends after work at Roppongi Hills and took some pictures of the tower from afar. It was SO cold, the coldest day of the year so far. Typical that Irish weather arrived on our national day. The sun had been splitting the trees for weeks before!
We took shelter in a nearby restaurant and enjoyed a beautiful dinner and some green tea. Powered up, we walked from Roppongi Hills to the tower itself. We couldn't get over the beauty of the illumination. As we neared, the tower seemed so huge. They achieved the effect by beaming green movie-studio sized lights from four corners onto the tower's strucure. My favourite photo is where I caught the beams of light in the dark - they're like ghostly ectoplasm.
I cannot emphasize enough how freezing my friends and I were and yet how undaunted we remained. It was too moving and beautiful a sight not to appreciate to the fullest. Plus, I guess we were dressed like Eskimos and Canadian husky runners so we didn't suffer too badly.
The cold was a good excuse to hit an Irish pub and water the shamrock. One Guinness for 7 euro is not an every day indulgence, but for the day that was in it, it was well worth the price. I JUST made it home on the last train, luckily. It shows I've improved in strides from my time living in Australia when I hardly ever managed to make the last ferry home.