September 6

Day 6

Yesterday we started off by taking it easy for awhile. Frank was staying here at Asakusa Smile with us for an extra night and we all woke up and sat around for a bit. I had slept basically the entire day and night before because I was so exhausted from being up all night at the concerts and in Tsukiji. I did some logic games to practice for the LSAT and Collin helped me out with some Kaplan wisdom, which was nice and hopefully will prove useful because I am doing really poorly at the games right now.

After that we went to check out a kaitenzushi (conveyor belt sushi) place that Frank and Collin found while I was asleep, which apparently is the cheapest one in Tokyo according to the receptionist here. It was super delicious and I got away with spending less than like 5 or 6 bucks. Frank and Garrett were feeling a bit sick in the morning which was too bad, but we all kept on trucking, so to speak, and went over to the Sony building in Ginza, which is evidently where all the rich people go to shop. The Sony building was pretty cool, and full of products to try and demonstrations and cool modern stuff. 3D tvs are pretty cool. Also they had this really awesome HD TV on which they were showing Resident Evil Apocalypse, which was funny because the TV was so good that it made the movie look like an even lamer B-movie with crappy special effects. Every time they showed Nemesis it just looked too much like a dude in a silly costume to suspend disbelief about the movie.

After Sony we went over to a department store to figure out what else to do, and then did a little bit of wandering around in there. Men's fashion here is super awesome, and if I could I would totally fill my wardrobe with crazy designer clothes from the 6th-8th floors of that place, but most of the stuff, even T-shirts or whatever, was between 50 and 400 dollars. Frank went home to rest because he was feeling pretty sick. After that, we headed over to the Yebisu beer factory, which was sweet. They had some delicious beers there to try, although I only got 2 because they were 400 yen each. Kohaku Yebisu is definitely one of the most delicious beers I've had.

Then we headed over to Shinjuku to check out the lights. I really liked Shinjuku; in general the people seemed nicer than in Shibuya, and it was super beautiful at night because almost all the stores have huge neon signs or the buildings' walls are giant TVs. It also has the biggest train station in Tokyo. We ate at a cheap curry place for 600 yen, and it was okay. I wish I had gotten cheese curry like Collin because that stuff was delicious compared to mine. We wandered around Shinjuku having a few convenience store Chyuhai Strongs, and then sat around talking for awhile. We were feeling a bit too tired to really want to wander around forever.

Unfortunately, while we were talking, we forgot about the last train until 5 minutes after it left, and we were stuck in Shinjuku for the night! Wow was that careless of us. So we first sat around at a place where we got harassed by various Africans trying to get us to go to strip clubs and karaoke bars. Basically they just wander around from person to person giving you "deals" and really selling hard to try to get you to show up wherever they're going. You can't believe anything they say. Basically we all just stood there and fucked with them for awhile while they lied to us, until they realized that they were, in Collin's words, getting tooled more than they were tooling us. We told some of them that we didn't speak English very well, that Collin was French, that the last guy offered us some crazy deal, etc. Haggling with Africans on the street is actually pretty fun. We also met a white guy hustler who at first said that he had lived here for 2 years and spoke good Japanese, but then he said he couldn't understand our dialect, which is Tokyo dialect, which is where he said he was staying, which was hilarious. Then he had only been here for 2 months. I'm not sure exactly what he was hoping to get from us in the end but it was funny to fuck with him. Eventually they started telling each other that we weren't retarded enough to fall for their silly tricks. Then we wandered over and sat outside a convenience store accosting any Japanese person who would talk to us. We chatted with a couple of dudes who actually seemed to be having fun talking to us. No one here really speaks English honestly. I mean, here in Tokyo you can find them, but if you're just out on the streets at night you'd better know Japanese if you want to talk to people. When they left we met a tall lanky young dude, or what looked like a young dude but was actually a 33 year old or something. We talked to him for a little bit about basketball and picking up girls or something (it's entertaining to talk to Japanese guys about picking up girls) and then another group of rowdy young Japanese came and smoked with us, and generally we laughed and had a confusing hilarious time. They seemed maybe to be trying to get us in a situation where they could take advantage of us, but maybe not, I can't be sure. So we left them and the first guy took us over to this small bar in an alley, where he bought us all whiskey. After awhile the bartender gave us some little egg sushi-roll-like things which were actually pretty tasty. We offered to buy that guy his next drink. Somehow I ended up paying like 1000 yen though which was really annoying and confusing. Oh well that's what you get when you miss your train and stay out all night. The dude left for awhile (I didn't know why or when really), and then eventually reappeared with little boxes of froxen chocolate and vanilla ice cream desserts for all of us, which was super nice of him. I think he was trying to get us laid with this random girl who was there, but she wasn't that attractive and also I think she may have been like 15 or something. I don't really know. But all in all that was a funny way to spend a night.

However, I was really damn drunk and exhausted by 4:30 am when we decided to head back to the train to get home. Fortunately Collin navigated the trains and I just followed him and Garrett around, mostly with my eyes closed and falling asleeep. I had a really fucking bad headache and I could barely keep my eyes open, and it seemed like we had to take a million trains to get back here. In the end we got back here around 6, and our check out time was between 9 and 10. So we made ready to check out when Frank woke us up at 9:30 or something, and went downstairs to figure out what to do. We had planned on taking the train to Nikko today, but we were way too tired to go sight-seeing all day, and the only hostel there is like $50 a night. We considered taking the train to Sapporo a day early, but we'd have to activate our JR pass a day early and that would mess with our schedules a lot. So in the end we decided to just stay here again and sleep all day and night, and then hopefully tomorrow we're going to stop by Nikko in the morning, and then head up toward Sapporo.

I woke up around 5 or something and started doing this. Taka-san evidently is staying here now and he showed up here to say hi. Actually, he just came in and said he is cooking Sukiyaki tonight and wanted to know if we would join him, which is really nice of him. So I'm about to go do that, and then probably go back to bed until tomorrow morning.

...Homemade sukiyaki is delicious!