I had a pretty good weekend. I went to a concert in Shimokitazawa by myself on Friday night. I was planning on going to a concert with Chu on Friday, but it turned out the concert he invited me to was actually on Saturday, so I ended up with no plans on Friday and I checked around online and decided I'd just head out and find something on my own. The concert wasn't great, but I met some nice people who may or may not come to my shows this week (of which there will be 3!!).
On Saturday I had no daytime plans so I slept in a little bit and then decided I would go someplace I haven't been to yet and walk around with no map. I picked Omotesando because it's a large street that has all the big designers' stores (Prada, Gucci, Dolce & Gibana, etc.), so I figured I'd see some very fancily-dressed people and some cool stores and that'd be fun. There were not very many people around the Omotesando Station area, so I was disappointed, and the only big designer's store I saw was the Prada store (which was pretty cool, but I was hoping for more). But I walked for a loooong time, and somehow ended up going in a big spiral shape. I went from Omotesando South-west-ish to Gotanda, then North-west-ish into Shibuya (but I stayed on the outside edge of Shibuya, away from the area I am normally in there), and then North to Harajuku, then South-east back towards Omotesando but I found a station before I got there (I dont know what station it was) so I just hopped on the train there. Somewhere in between Gotanda and Shibuya, I ended up in a very large Cemetary. It was four whole blocks and really pretty, so I spent about an hour there, walking up and down the rows
and stopping occasionally to rest. That was the best part of the whole walk. I didn't bring my camera, but I got one picture I took with my camera phone, which you can see on the left. I like it because you can see how nice the place is, and theres also a huge office building in the background.On Saturday night I decided I would do the whole staying-out-all-night-until-the-morning-train thing, since I slept in in the morning and all. My friends Satoshi and Tatsu were going to both be DJ-ing at the Ruby Room from midnight until 5 AM, so I headed over there at about 10:30. The place was pretty empty when I got there and throughout the whole night there were only like 20 people there, at most. Adam, the bartender (from Australia) said on Saturday's it's usually no less than a hundred people through the whole night and this was really rare. It turned out to be a good thing, though, I thought. I got to have longer conversations with people and it was pretty cool. There aside from Tatsu and Satoshi, the people I really enjoyed talking to were Adam, Peko (another bartender), and Johnny (a New Zealander who also DJed a little bit before Satoshi and Tatsu started their sets). Since there were so few people there, Satoshi was able to bring me into the DJ booth and show me how the equipment worked. That was awesome. It seemed pretty complex to me and I was really impressed, but Satoshi said once you get the hang of it it's really really simple. I'd like to try sometime, but I have no idea how I would do that since I don't have the equipment or anything. I also discovered my new favorite drink. It's called Umeshu and it's a Japanese plum wine made from sake. It is soooo good. Oh, and the other good thing about having so few people there was that every hour or so Adam would make a drink for everybody at the bar, for free. It was a good experience, although I was dead tired on Sunday so I don't know if I'll ever do it again. Hehe. I also fell asleep almost immediately on the morning train (at about 5:30) and missed my stop by a long shot. I woke up like 8 stops past where I was supposed to get off!
Oh yeah, the cops were also out and about at 5/6 AM. As a foreigner, I have to carry my passport or a copy of my passport with me at all times. If the cops were to stop me for any reason at all (and they don't even really need a reason to) and I didn't have it on me, they could arrest me. So I always carry it just in case, although it's generally understood that the police would never actually stop you if you were just walking around like normal. I've never even heard of them ever stopping a foreigner for no reason, nor has Ted (my boss). But on Sunday morning when I got off the train at Shimbashi there were a bunch of cops just walking around, "keeping the peace," and luckily there was another white guy getting off the train, too, who was walking like 20 feet in front of me because the cop at the station entrance stopped him right away, and I just kept on walking. I mean, I had my passport copy with me and all, but I was a bit drunk and a lot tired and just didn't want to deal with that whole situation. So I got pretty lucky. I'm sure I would've been stopped if the guy in front of me hadn't been there.
I got to bed around 6:30 am and slept until about noon. I tried to sleep longer, but my body wouldn't have it, so I got up and did my laundry and cleaned up my room a bit. At 5 I headed out west to Kichijoji, which I had never heard of before--it's like a 40-minute train ride away--where I was meeting Kie for dinner. It was actually a really really cool area. There were just a ton of little streets lined with all kinds of stores and the streets were packed with pedestrians. There was also a pretty nice park with a lake, and row-boats you could rent, that we walked around. At the park there was an art fair going on, so the walkway was lined with people sitting on tarps with little crafts laid out for sale. It was neat. There were a lot of things I wanted to buy, but I was low on cash at the time and so ended up not getting anything at all. Kie wanted to take me to a very old and famous yakitori (grilled chicken-kebobs) place that was right next to the park, but there was a huuuuuuge line just to get in, so we decided to go across the street to a smaller place and we got to eat outdoors there, which was nice. I'm still not great with food names in Japanese, so I just let Kie order whatever she thought would be good and it was quite a spread: fresh prosciutto, octupus fried rice, some mollusks, shrimp (scary shrimp! you eat the head and legs and all), a bit of yakitori, and some pasta. I was proud of myself for trying all of it. The mollusks were pretty good, but the scary shrimp was a bit much. haha. Oh, the octupus rice, though, was fantastic! Afterwards we went to a nearby cafe for dessert: tea/coffee and ice cream. We got 3 flavors of ice cream for 400 yen (good deal!) and so we had green tea flavor, sweet cream, and chocolate hazelnut. It was quite good. We talked in English pretty much the whole time because Kie said she really wanted to practice (she's been studying English forever and spent a year in England, but doesn't get many chances to speak English anymore) because she has a job interview next week that is entirely in English. She's basically fluent in English, so she should be fine, but she does like to swear in English so I told her to be careful of that! haha.
This week we have one trade show we will be going to--I think on Wednesday--for bio-tech stuff, which could be pretty interesting. Oh, the Auto Service show last week turned out to be a bit more interesting than I thought it would be, and I got to meet our client, who is from St. Louis, so that was cool. After we were done at the auto service show we still had some time to kill before the end of the day, so we decided to check out the cable tv show that was going on at Big Sight at the same time, since it was free admission. That was sooo awesome. Half of the show was devoted to equipment/technology (HDTVs, HD cameras, DVRs, etc.) and the other half was devoted to programming. The programming side was amazing. Each channel had these crazy elaborate booths set up, and there were sooo many campaign girls in wild, skimpy outfits. haha. The baseball network had girls dressed in oversize jerseys and short shorts, and they had an interactive baseball videogame, in which there's a pitcher on screen and you swing this miniature bat and it registers on the tv, and if you hit a certain number of home runs they would give you a prize. There were a lot of people in line for it, though, so I didn't do it. Most booths, though, had little games you could play or something like that. The FOX booth was modeled after a prison, to promote their show "prison break," which is just starting here (it started a year or two ago in the US), and they had campaign girls in skin-tight police uniforms. The rest of the campaign girls weren't in such thematic costumes, but they sometimes had even less clothing than the "police-girls." One booth (for an action movie channel) had a cork-gun firing range game, in which you had to get 11 points in 3 shots to get a big prize. The targets were in numbers of 1, 5, and 10. The ten was small and actually behind the 1 targets, except for a very small sliver that you could, in theory, hit without having to knock over the 1-point targets, although it would really be basically impossible. Ted went up and on his first shot hit that very tiny sliver of the 10-point target! haha. All I got was 1 point, but I still got the consolation prize of a post-it note pad. Afterwards I was like "I didn't know you were such a sharpshooter! Should I be worried?" but apparently Ted didn't hit any other targets with his other 2 shots, so he didn't get a big prize either! Anyways, the show was all in good fun, and Ted and I went for a beer afterwards which was also fun. Although Ted and I are both quiet-ish people (I'm much less quiet than I used to be, but still...), so there were some long awkward pauses in our conversations. heh. oh well...
Okay, I think I've been writing in here for about an hour now, so I'm done! Love, Lawrence!
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