Blog 7

Where was I?

Oh yeah! Walking around taking pictures with hot Asian girls… of course! The day in Shibuya was coming to an end.

The sun was going down and it was starting to rain. We went back to the Hostel back on the subway. I'm not kidding, without Jimmy, we would have had no idea how to get around. The subways were interesting in that it was just people on-the-go, and it was very structured, people were just sitting on train cars packed like sardines staring at the ground or sleeping. Some of the them had doctors masks on, so if I wanted more space I would just break into a violent cough attack, and then I could stretch out. We decided to go back and nap for a while before dinner. We got a pretty late start that night, and we ate at around 11 PM and then at 12:02 we realized "welp, guess we're not going downtown." We were sitting in a booth, still thoroughly enjoying ourselves for dinner, when we heard Jay-Z's "Empire State of Mind" playing from the table behind us. We turned around and saw a Japanese couple who was playing the song from their lap top. It went with a personally edited and created video of his trip to New York, 2 weeks previously. We got to talking with them(as best we could) and they invited us to a karaoke club. We went and sang Karaoke with them and the rest of the night was pretty much history. The karaoke, however was funny in that it was all just different American music with lyrics while montages of white American girls from the 80's were playing in the background screen, usually sitting in a park by the fountain or sitting by the phone or looking passionately out a window; meanwhile we were standing on chairs and rapping Eminem or singing the Backstreet Boys. We didn't get back until about 4 AM that night either, after stopping at the 24 hour McDonalds for late night munchies. But I suppose it was more of early morning munchies. After thanking and greeting the nice locals we met… and checking our pockets to make sure they weren't conning us, we departed for the hostel to conclude another fun night.

We woke up the next day with nothing on the itinerary but adventure. We headed the opposite way of the subway, and stumbled across some awesome stuff. South of our hostel, we found a shopping area, with little souvenir shops, cheap dinning, soccer fields, arcades, batting cages, even a temple. At this temple, there was a little hut where smoke was coming out, and people were standing before it and ushering smoke out of it and in to themselves as some religious gesture. There was also Nazi signs all over, which apparently meant something in Japanese before it was the universal symbol for white power and genocide.

I bought a white headband that you would usually see on a sushi chef that says Kamikazee in Japanese writing. I would imagine that it is offensive… but I saw little kids wearing 'em too. For lunch that day, we went to a restaurant where you go inside, and there's a vending machine and then press the button of the picture of what you want, and then get a ticket. You sit down and they bring you miso soup, a small salad, and whatever you ordered with rice. I'm pretty sure mine was cat, but it was the best damn cat I've ever tasted. So we went back twice before the trip was over. Oh yeah and they also brought me a raw egg… which I thought was not raw and ate it accordingly….( I know we looked like such idiots). This place would come to be known as vending machine café. That night, we went to the first restaurant and ate sushi; completely unsatisfied and still hungry, we found our way to another place, where we couldn't communicate what-so-ever. We had one single bowl for the 4 of us of steaming meat (cat or dog), and then paid and left. Then we went back to Vending Machine Café and fulfilled our hunger needs.

We went back to the hostel and took a shower and got ready. My shower experience took about 30 minutes, which is why I only took two. At the hostel, we had a room that we all shared and then another room with a sink and two doors. Behind one door, was literally a 2 by 3 ft box with a toilet and the other was a 4 by 10 ft shower room. We actually all took off our pants before we got into the toilet room because we found it worked that much better. The shower had a lower part where water came out and a shower head. The shower head, however, did not turn hot. I ended up filling up a coke bottle and pouring it over myself the whole time. We went out to Ropongi again that night and were directed toward a club called Muse. We walked in and found two white kids shooting pool and two Asian bartenders, one of which was wearing a Mickey Mouse shirt. We looked at the menu and saw 12 dollar drinks. We sat and decided what we were gonna do before we got kicked out for not ordering drinks. After that we continued to walk until we found a black man who tried to hustle 30 bucks out of us to go to a bar and drink all-you-drink. We talked him down to 100 dollars for the 4 of us, and then I said "Do you have Red Bull?" he shook his head, and it was a done deal. We spent the night talking with new people and enjoying the atmosphere of this club/bar, before we all decided we had had enough… at 5AM, and made our way home.

The next day, we found some more SASers and toured Tokyo with them. We spent part of the day searching for one of their lost wallets and when we found it at a hotel, the guy at the desk said "Japan very safe". We went up in a tower and took some pictures, I wish I could remember the name of it, but it seems to have escaped me. We booked a night bus in order to get from Tokyo to Kobe, where the ship would meet us; and boarded the bus after a long walk uptown at 10:20 at night. When we got on the bus, we found no bathroom and that the bus was arranged with Asians in mind. I spent 9 hours with my knees slammed in a seat and my back upright. I'm very lucky that I was improperly hydrated. I nodded off a few times, but was awake for the majority of the trip. Needless to say… it sucked. The goal was to get to Kobe in time for breakfast on the ship (7AM-830), but we missed it by about 20 minutes. I came back and unpacked and showered before I got a knock on my door.

The last words I wanted to hear were "Get up dude, we're going to a castle", but that's exactly what I heard. I got off the ship with the fellas, walked to the end of the dock and said "you guys have fun." I came back and unloaded my pictures on my computer and for some reason still couldn't sleep. At lunch time on the ship, I found Yudai, Sam, and Mac again and we went out exploring Kobe. I found a super hot Asian girl to take a picture with, while Yudai translated, probably just telling her we were idiots and then apologizing.

We went to an internet café but I couldn't do much with that Japanese keyboard. I wrote Happy Valentine's Day (2 days early in America) on a girl from home's wall on facebook, and watched how-to-learn-Chinese videos on youtube. In the city I bought some construction paper and a marker and did a little project, but it was more of a task just finding the supplies. I found some new stunna' shades for 10 bucks because my old ones fell off the boat in Hawaii. I came back to the ship called it a day and was out by 7:00PM.

What an adventure!