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Tokyo is Godzilla!(of Japanese cities)
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So, Tokyo.
Yeah, it was pretty exhausting, but my friend Elin, from Sweden, and I set out Friday night on the overnight bus from Osaka>>Kyoto>>Tokyo. It was cramped quarters and uncomfortable, but it got us there ok! (Although we almost missed it thanks to a policeman who sent us in the opposite direction. Never trust traffic cops at bus stations in Japan, guys!) So, we got off the bus at 7:15 in the morning in Tokyo with nowhere to stay that night and sleep deprived brains. So I decided the first smart thing to do would be to find the location *so we'd know For Sure* where the bus was leaving from when we would ride back to Osaka that Tuesday night. So, we walked under the streets through the subway tunnels ( I had never seen a part of Japan that had litter--actual litter, obviously on the street in plain view!--and homeless men until I came to Tokyo. It was very.. unnerving. Tokyo is much more like an international city.) So, we surfaced in the Business district in Shinjuku, in Tokyo, got some breakfast, and found the location. Then, we stashed our stuff in lockers (in Japan, there are lockers very conveniently placed in subway stations everywhere. Yay!) After that, we roamed around the back alleys of Shinjuku and headed to Kabuki-cho, which was eerily quiet in the mid morning hours that we were there, but it notorious for being Tokyo's scandalous (and cheap!) red light district when the streetlights come on. We wandered around scouting out good (and cheap!) karaoke places, then we ran into a Shinto shrine, that was unassumingly hanging out near a corner near the Golden Gai, an old school bar-area of Kabuki cho (that was near a bunch of Thai restaurants and male host clubs, where huge pictures of men with equally huge hair try to entice women in for drinks in the afterhours of the night.) After that interesting walk, we then headed for Elin's Square Enix shop, which happened to be right next to the Tokyo Metropolitan Opera House. That was some interesting architecture/sculpture for you. Then, we hopped into a police box to get directions to where Elin wanted to go, then headed so she could satiate her final fantasy craving (it's a really popular video game, whose merchandise is sold exclusively at this shop in tokyo.) Then, a quick, cheap, filling lunch at a chain restaurant here called Yoshinoya (it's basically beef and rice and onions..but delicious anyway!) Then, we hopped on a train headed for Akihabhara, the famous cheap electronics district for gamers in Tokyo.
So, I'm not big on video games, but even I could appreciate Akihabhara. I bought a 1gigabyte XD memory holder for my new awesome digital camera and new headphones (my old ones broke.) Both for a pretty reasonable price. There were so many competing companies.. blocks and blocks of them, and people in weird outfits.. the farther from the train station you got, the weirder the outfits and the more, cheaper shopping there was. There were action figures, tons of video games, computer equipment, and tons of signs for maid cafes, which are cafes where Japanese girls dress up like cute maids and serve their customers like a real maid would, calling them 'master' and being doted on by loyal customers (there were supposedly butler cafes that were this in reverse that elin and i searched for, but to no avail. Although I'm sure the butlers wouldn't have been so scantily clad as some of the maids that were off-duty hanging out around the station were.) So, after that interesting experience of streets crowded with eager hagglers searching for the newest, cheapest material to fix their computer with or a boxed DVD set of their favorite animated Japanese TV show, we decided we needed a change of pace and headed off to out-of-the-way Yebisu.
So, at Yebisu there was apparently a building called Yebisu Garden Place.. or was there? We got off the train and searched for the building, but only found directions pointing the way.. no photos, or anything of that sort. After walking up and down stairs a few times, we finally came out onto a street corner.. and across the street diagonally was Yebisu Garden Place. It was an actual Place: a square block of restaurants and shopping, all quaintly set out in a style reminiscent of charming European platzes (or at least, the Japanese idea of what a European square would be. There was a german style building in the back, which for a second made me forget that I was in Japan.)
Once we were there, we did a little window shopping and garden walknig, then we went for Italian food. Ordering Italian food in Japanese is a lot of fun, let me tell you. We would've ordered Japanese food, really, but the Italian was a good deal.. and so delicious.. and she and I have gotten so sick of Japanese food over the past few months that it was time for a break... So, then we decided to head out for a night on the town! We wound up heading to Shibuya, one of Tokyo's nightclub districts (the other, Roppongi, is famous for being geared almost exclusively to foreigners visiting.. so we weren't interested in going there...) So, we get to Shibuya.. and it's packed with people! (well, it was a saturday night!) There were street performers, a drunk man embracing the famous dog statue there (named the Hachiko statue after the dog's ..it's a famous statue with a story about a very loyal dog behind it) and random people standing in front of the station with signs saying "Free Hugs" in english.( I don't know either.) So, then we walked across the street to the hoppin nightlife of Shibuya! The streets were crowded with people walking, talking, and barely doing either succesfully! So we headed into the first club we saw, called Gaspanic, and were confronted by a sea of people and very Americanized music. So, we hung out for awhile.. Elin was having a good time, but I wasn't a big fan of hip-hop music, so I felt kind of uncomfortable.. until we met a really nice group of people from the US who we hung out withall night.They had come from a university in Georgia, U.S.A, so poor Elin was stuck hanging out with Americans all night, because after awhile we decided to head out to some other places. They had come to Tokyo on their spring break. It was three girls and two guys, named Jen, Christine, Dominic, Brad, and Erin. They were a really good time, and all of them were seniors in college, about a year older than me. Next, we went to another bar that sucked, so then we left and had a nice older Japanese and his wife help us find Club Asia, which was in a back corner of Shibuya.. we got in, and there was a blues band playing music on the first floor. The place was a nice mix of Westerners and Japanese, equal parts both with maybe even a little more Japanese. We wound up (along with the rest of the club, after an hour or so!) On the top floor, with club/house music being spun by a DJ who was being filmed for something, so we all danced and had a good time. Elin wound up meeting a cute Japanese boy, and we parted ways for the night, so stuck around with the other Southerners... finally, it got to be around 4:30 in the morning, and the night was winding down, so we grabbed two cabs and I tried to help them get back to their hostel from the subway stop the cab driver left us off at... they were so nice, they even let me sneak into their hostel and crash with them. It was pretty funny, being so exhausted and just passing out on a random couch, but it sure beat sleeping in a cubicle in an all-night cafe where people go to read comics (they're very popular here, it seems.) So, the next day I bid them adieu on their trip back to the States.. then, headed to Shinjuku to go meet up with Elin.. we were both pretty tired after our crazy night, so we decided to head for some light shopping and park-picknicking near Harajuku....more on that in my next installment on Tokyo!!
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| 9. | Tokyo is Godzilla!(of Japanese cities) - Tokyo, Japan Mar 15, 2008 (  48 ) |
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