Tokyo (Part 2)
Our second day in Tokyo was one of the most fun days in Japan (though it’s hard to really compare them to eachother). We woke up late and decided to head out for lunch and take a long walking tour of the city (or at least the small fraction of it that you can see in a day). We met Chris on his way in on our way out. I think he spent the day in bed with a hangover.
We took the subway from Jimbocho to Shibuya again, looking a bit different in the day, but just as crowded. There were street performers, speakers blasting Japanese pop music on the corner (familiar stuff to me, having played so much DDR), and protestors in loudspeaker-equipped trucks shouting things about China. One of the very interesting features I saw in Shibuya was a glass-encased “smoke area” where smokers could light up without disturbing the rest of the citizens. Occasionally we saw people wearing face masks (originally I thought it might have been SARS fears, but I think it is just a common courtesy thing to do if one is sick). Finally, we were too starving to go any further so we went into — go figure — a TGI Friday’s. Our waitress was very cute and friendly, and spoke English pretty well. When we complimented her English, she told us that usually Americans laugh at her and tell her that she doesn’t speak well… which is really a rotten thing to do, especially since it wasn’t true.
After Friday’s we went on an incredibly long walk that tired us out quite a bit… it was a very hot day. We walked all the way to Akihabara, the electronics district, partially because Jose wanted to buy an electronic dictionary and otherwise just to see the area. Akihabara is known as the “geek” district because of how many electronics and trendy things are there. It’s where all the otaku hang out, and I could see why. It was a techie’s fantasy world… The sheer number and variety of cell phones and digital cameras was enough to make me drool. One of the highlights of Akihabara was walking into an electronics store to find Shaolin Soccer (which I had been ranting and raving to everyone about) playing on one of the TV’s… so I got to show them the ending of it. The other highlight was going into the giant 7-story Sega arcade building. Wow… that’s all I can say. Wow…
It was a good thing David had been to Tokyo and knew his way around, or else we’d have been lost really quickly. We left Akihabara and took the subway to Roppongi, playing the Kanji game along the way; the way white people read kanji is by making up what the character most closely resembles in picture-terms. For example, we knew that “Man - Man on a Pogo Stick - Man with a Pogo Stick shoved up his Butt” means Roppongi, while “Hairbrush - Radioactive ‘R’” means train station… so we were able to find our way around.
In Roppongi we saw Tokyo Tower from a beautiful distance and everyone took pictures (except me, since I always forget my camera). There was a large statue of what looked like a spider near that area, and David and I began improvising a story about a giant spider attacking Roppongi, and the town was saved by Yamada-san the plastic man. The story was really stupid, in any case, but I only mention it because the rest of the people in our group were so amazed at the ability of Americans to just start talking about something, babbling and making it up as we went along, talking for hours and cracking up at it. We had the group laughing pretty hard about Yamada-san and the spider.
We walked through Roppongi for about an hour or more, talking about Yamada-san on the way, and finally we decided we were hungry. We stopped at a restaurant with an islandy theme and *very* overpriced food, and were placed on the 2nd floor where the ceiling was about 1 foot above our heads while sitting down. We were pretty laughy from the walk, and we continued to joke until we could hardly breathe. What finally tipped it over the edge was when our food came; I had ordered tomato and mozarella for about $8, so I expected it to be a decent meal. But for $8 I got the smallest half of a tomato I’d ever seen, with a slice of cheese on it, some olive oil, and a leaf of some kind. I felt pretty hungry afterwards, but it was worth it for the humor value.
After “dinner” we continued to walk around, looking for a bar. We met up with Chris, who was ready to go bar-hopping again, and walked around I-don’t-even-know-which district until we found a foreigner bar with decent prices ($4 a drink in Japan is a decent price). We drank for a while, and decided to look for a karaoke place after that. Looking for karaoke in Tokyo is like looking for cars in a parking lot. Virtually every building had karaoke on one of its dozens of stories… but unfortunately they were all booked through the night. We wandered about a bit more, since we had to be back to the train station by 11 to get the last train. The night scene in Tokyo is really crazy and fun… I wish we had more than one and a half nights there.
We got back to the hotel around 11:30 or so, exhausted from walking all day. David and I argued for a while about the meanings of bad words in different parts of the U.S., going so far as to each of us calling one of our friends to settle an argument… to no luck. Finally, we all went to bed.