tokyo, japan 2007!!
march 26th to april 2nd, 2007 (nippon!)
11:32 pm — before i start, some conclusions:
1) japanese women cannot walk with heels on.
2) japanese people don’t fucking eat vegetables other than regular salad (which, nutrition-wise, doesn’t really count).
3) japanese food you can think of off the top of your head (teppanyaki, sushi, yakisoba, tonkatsu, ramen, etc.) pretty much is japanese food, period.
4) japanese women say “gozaimasu” as a kind of formality meaning thank you or whatever, and say it SUPER nasally. amuse.
i’m not really all that impressed by tokyo, actually… although it is a great place to hang out when you’re young and robust, i imagine it’d be kind of boring when you’re older. and… there really isn’t that much to do anyhow. i think we only had fun cause yuki was there and his friends were there and miko’s friends were there… had we not known any japanese people there, it’d probably have been a helluva lot lamer…
now for recaps… oh my god i am so tired. this will probably have to be finished later since there’s so much shit to say.
monday, march 26th
lingo picked me up in the morning… i basically stayed up all night. slept like 3 hours. maybe. this pattern will soon be repeated, as you will find out soon. we headed over to tony’s house in issaquah and tony had JUST woken up basically and was not at all ready lol. nor had he really planned anything for us to do… lol. so we left in a hurry to go to the airport. got on the plane. “the fountain” was on as well as “stranger than fiction”… i was super excited to watch “the fountain” but unfortunately the audio on lingo and i’s consoles were not working. motherfuckers. united gave us some form we can fill out to maybe get some miles. but yea.
taking pics in the seatac airport… why not!?
sleeping in the seatac airport… why not?!
sleeping on the plane!!!
gag…
wednesday, march 28th — akasuka
got off the plane at like, i dunno, 3pm or something, and we had slept a lot of the plane ride and were mostly rested up. took the overground train to our place in asakusa… khaosan tokyo akasuka annex hostel. it was kind of hard to find at first but was then okay. the overground train seemed like the longest ride ever. seemed almost longer than the plane ride to japan lol. also, like, i kept sleeping with my head resting against the window behind me, and unfortunately, every time the train from the opposite direction passed by it’d scare the shit out of me and wake me up heh, cause it’d make the window rattle. anyway, we got to the hostel, put our shit down, and decided to go cash in on one free drink that our hostel offered daily at the location of their other akasuka hostel (khaosan tokyo smile). i got a white russian or whatever. it was good, as there was like no alcohol in it. lol. we were like the only people in there at first, although some people showed up later!
afterwards, went to eat some ramen at a corner shop in akasuka. had to cross a bridge to get there, and saw lot of dinner boats that people ate on. ramen was okay. we were the only tourists in there. tonkatsu ramen — i had miso-flavored one, and mine was the best. everyone else just got plain meat ones… and mine had like veggies and corn and stuff, so it was automatically better :0
after we ate it was like eight and we just walked around akasuka at night and looked at all the temples that were lit up by lights. looked good. yeahp. then we went back to the hostel and went to bed essentially. cool place. note: these photos are a culmination of everyone’s photos, so… yeah. i cannot take credit for most of these.
everyone else got a kick out of this. i actually didn’t even get it at first. lol?
our roommates for that night were a couple from australia and they were both graphic designers who had huge packs that were like, as big as me. they were going to india afterwards, and the girl had just come from china. lucky.
thurday, march 29th — akasuka, ueno, and akihabara
the next day, we all woke up at like 5am and decided to go rent bikes at 7am. had a difficult time finding the bike rental place at first, because we found a bike parking garage and assumed it was NOT in there even though it was. the bikes you could rent cost only 200 yen to rent a day (like, $1.50), and had these cool ass locks. if your key wasn’t in, you couldn’t rotate the bike tires. it was neat… the tourist map we had also had this giant pagoda logo which was an “information center” so we were looking for a big ass pagoda building — in reality, it was this little tiny thing that was like 10 feet tall only. lol. godamn tourist maps…
got our bikes and biked around the area cause lingo and i were super fucking rusty. scary man… very scary… to bike in the city cause there is just so much fucking shit around all over the place.
it was still early and nothing was open yet.
porn movie theatre in asakusa!!!!
anyway, ate lunch at yoshinoya, which is a cheap chain store type place that sells basically beef dishes with cooked onions over rice. pretty good and definitely cheap. everyone says shit in japan is sooo expensive, but it’s not really — maybe if you compare it to like, china, but compared to the u.s., not really.
after eating there, i had a massive nosebleed in their bathroom and was in there for fucking ever, bleeding all over the chair and floor and crap like that. after that day my nose pretty much hurt like a bitch :/ like, up in the nose cavity, not on the surface…
went to an arcade we found and allllmost beat “time crisis 4″, because i had exchanged $10 USD for 1,000 yen. unfortunately, though… i lent tony a couple hundred yen to play, and he died real fast, and so i was halfway through killing the final boss when i fucking died. godamnit. and no more money to beat it. UGHHHHH.
after that, we got our bikes which we parked on the side street and biked over the ueno. about a… 30 minute bike ride or something. it was kind of scary because of the huge amount of people X___X massive dodging required… almost killed myself and a few pedestrians um, a couple of times.
walked over the land bridge in ueno and went to this six story anime store (unfortunately, it had no naruto stuff — tony and lingo were looking for it, and i was looking for a rock lee to buy lenny since he looks like rock lee — or any katamari stuff, which was super sad!). yeah.
ueno
walked over to ueno park afterwards where there were a lot of cherry blossoms and stuff, but we were a week early for the cherry blossoms to be completely bloomed… lots of people and lots of of stairs, and i was quite sore the entire trip.
saw some kids being attacked and swarmed by pigeons and all that good stuff…!! lingo and miko got some good pics of that shit. lol.
after that, it was about, like 4pm and we had to meet yuki and miko’s friend tetsu at akihabara at 5pm, so we rode over there. took forever to meet up with both of them cause it was a crowded station and yuki was late and stuff, but yeah. this chick in this photo up here was promoting for a maid cafe!!!
went to eat at some nice restaurant and tetsu treated us. the place was nijumaru, and was a izukaya, which serves drinking food and snacks…)
walked around and went to don quixote, which at the upstairs of it (well, 5th floor or so) had a maid cafe, where girls dress up and talk to lonely guys. you pay them to talk to you. pretty fucking stupid. anyway. 6th floor had some weird thing where you can dress up and they take pics of you. i have no idea. japan is fucking weird, man.
random girl singing. not sure where!!!
after that, went to tully’s and met up with yuki/lingo’s friends from the united states. tetsu treated us yet again to ice cream and coffee. their ice cream had hot coffee on the bottom of it. kind of interesting…
it was interesting to see the shift between customs for the japanese dudes who had lived in the u.s. — they lived there for like 5 years so they had like really good english and not even their accents were too bad, but like… they would be talking to us and it’d just be like, what’s up, yoyoyo… and then they’d introduce themselves to tetsu and would all of a sudden be super formal, with like bowing and giving him their business card with two hands and stuff… lol. most amusing.
one of the guys who was there drove the jr transit trains. lol. he’s not a conductor, though! apparently conductors do the announcements over the intercom. hm, that’s news to me!
headed back to asakusa in a hurry so that we could return the bikes by 12am. got stopped by the police. they started off by asking me if i was okay or something and i obviously didn’t understand, so they talked to tony. and said some shit. and they looked at our passports and stuff. and we barely made it back in time.
went to bed after we got back to the hostel. i bought some towels from 7-11 prior to coming home and FINALLY took a shower for the first time in three days. it was a nice push-button shower that saved water and shit. wee!
attempted to sleep and COULD NOT SLEEP. AT ALL. the new roommate that night was from singapore and he slept right next to me in an upper bunk and was SO LOUD. it was INSANELY loud.
went downstairs for a while cause tony was down there and looked at some pics of tokyo, but then tony wanted to go to bed so i went too. there was this super fucking annoying guy downstairs who was talking about fucking his girlfriend in the hostel beds, in the shower stalls, in the toilet stalls, etc… when she came to town, and the same guy like, hit on every fucking girl around. he was annoying as SHIT. anyways.
went back to sleep at some point, and i spent the whole night up wishing to die or wishing it was morning so it would all just fucking end lol. at some point, tony started snoring too, and would basically snore at the intervals the other guy was not snoring. there was quite a pattern going on, and i remember thinking that compared to this guy’s snoring, tony’s was hella soothing, lol, cause it was like 1/3 the loudness.
i usually clap loudly to make people wake up from snoring, but with this guy, it was unpossible. lol. he would not even fucking stir. asshole.
woke up at 5am after a night of NO SLEEP AT FUCKING ALL. wee!
friday, march 30th — tsukiji, ginza, shibuya
once again, got up at 5am and got ready to leave to the tsukiji fish market sometime soon. a guy from the hostel, sarub, went with us. he had gone to the fish market the day before (wednesday), but the fish market was closed on wednesdays, so pwn the noob!!!!!
anyway, took most of my pics at the fish market because i’m weird, and SQUID ARE SO CUTE!!! there was lots of cutting of giant tunas.
we had lunch at a sushi place, and looked around for a place that had a line with japanese people, but not a HUGE line like some places had. i had whale nigiri, aji, anago, amaebi… anago was OK, not as good as unagi, and aji was kind of good… amaebi was eh, okay… whale was fucking nasty… kujira, it’s called. anyways. i also had a cooked tuna shioyaki that was pretty not good and looked nothing like its respective photo.
afterwards, we walked to ginza and looked at buildings there, in an attempt to find a citibank. sarub had a book which detailed where all the citibanks were, which was helpful, as citibank was like, the only bank in japan that allowed atm withdrawals from mastercard and visa.
lingo and i were in desperate need of a toilet, so we walked into one tower and happened to explore it. downstairs had some genmaicha soft-serve ice cream there, MMMM! tried toilet with ass spray action, and it was okay i guess, but couldn’t figure out how to FLUSH the toilet, rofls. lingo loved the ass spray cleaner and got addicted to it, rofls.
ginza sucks. these statues were the only fucking good thing about it.
okay fine this clocktower is KINDA cool but all these things are situated in the mall so that makes them lamer.
anyways. went to shibuya to meet up with yuki and he took us to a korean-influenced restaurant with small dishes again. sarub came with us, and then left to go meet up with other people afterwards (from some website called sofacrashers or something, which basically allowed people in foreign countries to go online and say, hey, i’m alone in this city for a week, who wants to show me around?). interesting.
afterwards we went to some department store or something and came across these weird exercise machines that were supposed to simulate horseback riding when really they were nothing like that… didn’t feel like a workout at all, really. interesting. lingo got addicted to these too. rofls.
then we went to karaoke at big one — two hours of karaoke at 1,000 yen an hour each for all you can drink. i was drunk after three. lol.
after singing, we went out to the hallway where lingo was talking to people, and joined in, kind of. lots of random shit was talked about, like…
- fat girls and pussies.
- homo! homo! homo!
- miko’s bus announcer voice.
- “funniest shit ever…”
- took lotsa videos…
videos sum it all up better, though, so yeah. no need to write about all this, as it is quite difficult to capture the greatness with just writing.
we had to hurry to leave to catch the subway, since it closes @ 12:30 or whatever. this is soon to be a pattern.
at this point, lingo was like a walking zombie… lol. ALSO soon to be repeated.
got back and hung in the hostel living room lounge for some hours, talking to some swedish people and stuff. they were watching south park. and they looked super old but were only like 20 and 22 — one guy had been there for like a year. tony was like, “don’t swedish people make awesome watches and stuff?” and i was like, “dude, that’s swiss not swedish!” and a bunch of european dudes had a real big laugh about it. lol. but apparently it is a common mistake lol…
we went on a midnight 7-11 run so miko and tony could get more beer. lingo passed out early and before we left tony went up and threw a tripod at lingo LOL in an attempt to wake him up. then threw everything in his pockets at lingo trying to accomplish the same. rofls. i bought a hentai mag at 7-11. tony and miko didn’t even remember going to 7-11 in the morning. lol.
went to bed and got about three hours of sleep. the roommate was still snoring loudly, but this time it was somewhat tolerable.
thursday, march 29th — mizue, shinjuku, akasaka
woke up at like, 8 or something ridiculous. i woulda slept more, but tony had told me to keep my key outside the door so they could pick it up before they came to bed, but they weren’t in bed in the morning, so i figured they never got the key. so… i kind of freaked out in my head because i was wondering if it was lost or not, so i had to wake up… turns out tony was passed out on the sofa downstairs and he HAD picked up the key — lingo and i spent two hours watching bad music videos on tv instead.
it was raining this morning really heavily and we were like super bummed, because we had to check out this morning. rain would have gotten us and our luggage soaked. luckily for us, however, when we were ready to leave, the rain stopped. we subway’d over to our new hotel in mizue (which is between the airport and asakusa… and btw, NO ONE knows were mizue is)… and we couldn’t check in until 3 because they were cleaning, so we walked around and explored the area.
went to eat italian food at some restaurant because italian food there is different — like, they put seaweed or salmon roe or random stuff on some dishes to make them more japanese. all italian restaurants have tabasco sauce readily available as well. i got doria. it was good. this restaurant had a cool self-service drink area and a buzzer that you could press when you were ready to order.
afterwards went to a ghetto ass fucking arcade to play the lamest fighting game ever (forget the name). mostly, we went there to kill time. it worked, i guess!
then we went to eat dessert at some cafe, and it was good times.
then we checked in, some people took showers after not taking them for so many days, and then we went to shinjuku to like, go clubbing. met up with yuki and walked around for a while — miko and i were going to fob it out on sunday, so we bought some socks, but no luck, cause there was no time to buy any other clothes :/
we went to eat teppanyaki / okonomiyaki and stuff…
then went to don quixote to buy lingo a sweatshirt since he was freezing his ass off. lol. he bought one and then takeo showed up. they all bought some sake at the store and drank it up in the street. drank up A LOT.
then we went to 747 karaoke to pre-funk it up for an hour. they sucked. didn’t give us more than three rounds of drinks. they were stingy! left quick since they no like us, and everyone else bought more sake for more prefunk. BAD IDEA.
we went to mcdonald’s to eat some food and drink. everyone was okay at this time. yuki treated us all. sat downstairs in a corner, and got soooo many looks! takeo sang happy birthday a few times to tony, and that was the start of having people stare at us. then we like, poured sake in a mcdonald’s pudding cup and made chairs fall over, and were loud and english-speaking, etc. got ready to leave and people were STILL staring.
but then tony started talking to some autistic-type girl and we stayed longer. she had pics she took from turkey or something. while waiting, we met a guy who had won a million dollars (USD, i think), and had given it all away to charity. he showed us photos of him next to the money.
he kept talking to me and i didn’t understand. made yuki/takeo translate. the dude drank 20 cups of coffee daily and he was droolmaster flex :0
lingo left after going to mcdonald’s since he was like, a zombie… lol. we met with raver richie around 11:30pm to go to ageha, and when we got out of the first subway train, yuki puked when we were coming up. he started not walking very well. lol. and it took forever to get from train to train since takeo and tony had to carry him!!
then yuki got on a train and puked all over the place (it was HUGE) and fell in his own puke :/
then at some point we ended up somewhere weird, and all the subways were closed. we talked about taking a cab, but yuki could not be moved, and the place we were standing just so happened to be a place that made it “illegal” to hail a cab.
first yuki passed out, then as tony was having some heart-to-heart with me, he passed out.
and then takeo passed out. lol. before that, though, takeo was trying to hail a cab while half asleep and it was quite scary. his eyes were like, closed as he was trying to hail the cab. lol.
then like… we tried to get tony and takeo up at the same time, and they were both like hella out of it, and just both were like, “okay! let’s get up!” although they had been like passed out, and both stood up all of a sudden together and ended up stumbling all over the place. but they were like, excited to get up, although they seemed not to know what to do with themselves after getting up, lol. eh, hard to explain. had to have seen it!
miko, richie, and i stayed there for forever, til like 4am. then we moved the three of them to a different corner where we attempted to hail a cab. sat for a while cuz it was hard to hail cabs, and yeah. takeo woke up at some point but was like a zombie! he kept saying, “samui! samui! samui!” then would go inside the store to get some food. then would come back out, eat the food, and keep saying, “samui! samui! samui!” then go back in the store. he tried paying for two empty bags of food at some point. HAHAHAHHAHA.
at 4am, some security guard dude helped us hail a couple cabs. the first said that he could only seat 2 people and that no one could sit in front. i think he was lying. then we got 2 other cars, and tony, takeo, and yuki took one to yuki’s apartment, and me, miko, and richie took the other to “shinohashi” (#4 bridge or something, where yuki lived, across from the iranian embassy, lol). suddenly, when we got out, yuki and tony were both all full of energy, lol. wth. 
we went to yuki’s and it cost about 2,000 yen, and everyone was confused. it was cheaper than we had expected.
tony and yuki had thought it was still like 12am and had no idea why we didn’t go to the club. lol. motherfuckers. yuki had a mean anti-social cat that hissed at epople. anyway, some people played on the computer but i went to bed pretty early and slept on yuki’s bed… there was some down blanket and i wrapped myself in it. at some point tony woke me up and carried me to sleep on the couch for some reason, and the down blanket was still wrapped around me (above and below). when i woke up, i was sweating like hell. lol. hot as balls. went to bed at 6am, woke up at 9am. gg.
saturday, march 31st — shibuya, mizue
called lingo when we woke up in the morning and said we were almost leaving. what a lie. lol. we were watching tv for like, ever, and basically left in like, an hour and a half. lol. takeo came with us. we got back to mizue and showered, got ready, and ate lunch at some french-influenced restaurant, then left to meet yuki in shibuya at hachiko. also met up with miko’s friend, yuji!
tony’s finger was rotting off from infection!
i had to go to citibank in shibuya to pick up some cash for miko and tony, since none of them had any money.
yuki took a lot of long exposure pics with all of us in that shibuya intersection (the busiest intersection in the world?) and it was quite boring…
then we all went to eat at a restaurant, kinda americanized again… i had some spicy chicken, miscellaneous asian stuff. kind of good.
after that, went karaoke yet again, at a new place… for 1,000 yen an hour. we stayed an hour and a half. again, there were limits to drinks, but it was better than yesterday. probably cause there was no crazy drinking today — it was fairly reserved.
it started raining when we left, and there was a guy pissing in the corner near hachiko. yeah. we waited for there a little bit. met up with richie and had to take a shuttle bus to go to ageha. takeo went home because he had to dj in the morning.
loud guy on the bus was screaming about being a gai-jin and a teacher in japan, but i guess he had pretty good japanese.
got to ageha. tony lost his wallet and found it. 35,000 yen cover. hi-tech lights, sound, and good music… reggae room — first time i’ve seen such a thing in a club!! it started out good then turned super bad. all the “hot girls” were there, i guess. tony almost got beaten up i think, cause he was freaking some guy’s girl.
richie kept saying something about how since we candywalked, we danced like we weren’t from japan. i don’t see why it matters, though — not everyone needs to look the same.
yuki lost his locker key cause he was breakdancing for a little while, but he found it because someone turned it in. karma, i say, because tony had found someone’s lost wallet and was trying to find a credit card in there to use it. grrrr.
also, ageha had like, a side room that had food vendors!! nice touch! yuki bought some stuff that was like jambalaya. it was kinda good i think. we fell asleep outside for a little while, waiting for the club to close at what we thought was 5… turns out it closed at 6… we ended up leaving at 5:30 because tony wanted to dance for a little longer. haven’t seen tony dance like that in, like, forever?
walked to some convenience store where some african dude offered to carry my food, saying that i was too small to carry it all. and one reached for my money, but i was like, “that’s my money!” i don’t know what that was all about, but then they bid me good day and left…?!
then we went to eat at some place where you pay first in a vending machine… had some curry stuff and some lady who worked there was incomprehensible. spoke in mumbles and crap. even japanese people didn’t understand her!
after that we went home because the trains were open, and slept in for the FIRST TIME! til 1:30pm.
there were so many people getting on the trains at 5:30am… asked yuji where they were going / coming from, and even he had no idea! and he is japanese!
sunday, april 1st — harajuku
went to harajuku and met with nanako. went to park, and there were some guys there with “free hugs” signs. one of the guys with the sign was talking to someone, so i hugged him from behind. lol. he was super surprised, and in america, people with that sign probably would have been like! hi! and hugged me back even though it was surprising… but this guy didn’t, lol. yeah. he was just kind of awkward about it.
soo… i made up a sign that said, “hugs, 1 yen,” and lingo held up a sign above me saying, “and herpes.” i got two people willing to pay one yen each, and two who didn’t have money so lingo “loaned them money”, and one which was tony, and two who were two cheap to pay one yen (which is 1/100th of a penny!!) bitches!
harajuku was kinda disappointing because i expected it to be a helluva lot bigger, but it was actually kind of small and restricted to just one small park section. some girls with costumes and what not.
afterwards, went to eat tonkatsu ramen. lingo and tony got spicy ramen and put a whole bunch of garlic in it. sounds good.
went shopping afterwards — there were some places with cool punk/goth clothes, but they were expensive. and there was one that was cheap, but it was for skinny people only :/
after that, we walked over to shibuya because tokyo tower was closed (yuki had wanted to take us there). we met up with yuki halfway and then went to the same ol’ familiar area in shibuya where we decided to go karaoke. takeo showed up too. some place where they filmed the karaoke scene in “lost in translation” tried to rip us off, so we went to big one — the same place as the first night we went karaoke. it was 25,000 yen a person for all-night karaoke, til 5am!!! same cost as 2 and a half hours lol. awesome!!!
only richie, lingo, and i stayed up the ENTIRE night. miko stayed up most of the night. takeo passed out first, then yuki, then tony. same ol, same ol. as we were leaving, i rubbed yuki’s head to try and wake him up, and he hated it, apparently — i didn’t see his face, but miko said he looked pissed lol. then i rubbed takeo’s head to wake him up, and his reaction was funny because instead of doing nothing like yuki, he started slapping the chair next to him hahaha. lol…
anyway, at 5am we walked to the place by hachiko and the busiest intersection in the world or whatever was now basically deserted!! everyone went home and took naps and left individually.
monday, april 2nd
left to go to the airport. thought our flight was at 5pm, but really, it was at fucking 1pm. so we sat in the airport forever. since we never really had time to go shopping, we talked about going shopping at the airport, but there really wasn’t anything to buy. had risotto at the airport. tried massage chairs with lingo at the airport. they were mostly fun but made me kind of sick afterwards. watched part of “stranger than fiction” on the plane, and it seems pretty good but i didn’t get to finish it — did, however, watch parts of “the good german” with george clooney and it seems dumb… and watched the whole of “curse of the golden flower,” which VISUALLY is AWESOME but everything else about it is fucking terrible. ick. ICKKKKKK.