Well, Thursday night Sarah, Lesley, Abby, Amanda, Juliana, and myself went to the alleyway post class to get some dinner. The alleyway area, as previously mentioned is rather groovy. From the street, all you see is a small neon gate. But as you get to the gate, you'll see a small alley like area loaded with tons of small food shops and street vendors. I haven't seen it during the day, but I'm willing to bet that it is only really alive at night. It seems Tokyo doesn't truly come to life until 10PM. The Japanese are much different than Americans in terms of their after work activities. The American mindset is Work ends, run home. In Japan, all the end work means is that you're now off the clock...but still on the job. Company members then go out for drinks/socialization with each other. As a result, the busy evening rush hour tends to be the last few trains in the evening. Sadly, I couldn't get any good pictures of the alley itself, but I managed to take a few pictures of some fun things!
As you might guess, this place involves alcohol.
Here there be frogs! RIBBIT! "Human Song Network." That sounds sinister, doesn't it? And you'd figure they'd show humans, unless those are former humans who have been turned into frogs. Either way it's a karaoke bar. We'll get more into that sorta thing later.
GIANT FUCKING EGG. I have no idea why. I don't question it. GIANT FUCKING EGG.
Moving on, we went to what I think was a Chinese place. I ordered a yummy shrimp and soba dish (yummo). We spent some time there eating our meals, drinking godawful jasmine tea, and generally being gaijin. After that we headed to our respective stations and headed home. Helpful note: The Kehin-Tohoku JR Line rocks because it runs a bit later. Rock. This will come in handy at a later episode, I'm sure.
So last night...
The story begins after Prof. Wilson's class let out. Set your clocks to 7PM tokyo time. After some false starts and other ishkabible we headed over to Roppongi (In truth it was next to Roppongi hills) to go to a venue known as the Super Deluxe. The venue was really trippy.
It was kinda like some sorta Andy Warhol-ian bar/space dream. After going down a spiral of a set of stairs, you get to the anteroom. A quick photo of one of my fellow students in the ante-room.
So yeah. Eyes everywhere. Creepy. The inside was also...interesting. Crowded as hell though. The place was packed with both law students and undergrads. We arrived during the talk from this past year's Cherry Blossom Queen. Side note: I missed drinking the Jagermeister. According to Amanda, it actually is a bit different/better in Japan. MOOF! Grr! After the Cherry Blossom Queen, we had a guest expert come in to teach us all about Sake! Very useful! very informative! we also got a list of good brands to buy and other such things! Luck-ee! Then madness transpired, as the sake tasting begun! YUM! There were 7 different bottles of good quality sake. Some of them were only so so if you ask me. They tasted like the stuff I get back in the states. However, some of the other sake was really unique. I dare say some of it had a bit of fruitocity to it. RANDOM PICTURE TIME
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This was outside the Super Deluxe. Can anyone tell me what an "Avant-guarde women's toilet" is? And more importantly...why someone would want one?
So yeah...we were inspired to quest after that for some real good sake of our own. We navigated through Roppongi to find a way to safely cross the street and ended up at a small Sake-ya. I spoke with the clerk there as best I could and sadly he had to inform us that he didn't have any of the top sakes on the list. We did manage to get a big bottle of great sake anyways. From Roppongi we headed to...well...damned if I know. The area where Sarah lives in. Our first stop was Mos Burger for some midnight munchies. Not too shabby. The old lady working behind the counter was exceptionally nice, and did her best to deal with the sudden influx of noisy non-Japanese speaking gaijin that was our crowd. I'm actually shocked that my Japanese is starting to improve a bit. I've been able to communicate decently. I'm still no where close to the level of some of the other people but I'm better than I was.
Originally, we planned to go to Sarah's to drink drink drink, but on the way we came across a fun looking karaoke place. In a spur of the moment decision, we decided to go there. It LOOKED like it was only 400YEN a person per hour. So we opted for 3 hours. We were shown to our own private soundproof room, given a book full of English songs, and opened up our sake and began drinking. Lots of fun. Lots of good songs. Amanda and I did our best "Young One's" imitation to...uh...Cliff Richard's "Young Ones." Amanda and Lesley also each got another bottle of wine. In the end, I drank 1/5th a thing of sake and 1/2 a bottle of wine. And it had no effect. :( Disappointing.
We left the joint after paying way too much money and split up again. It was about 3AM so the trains were down for the night. I went with Lesley and Juliana back to shirokane-takanawa station by taxi (TOO MUCH $$) and we went to Juliana's place for a bit. They took her room, and I took the kitchen floor. Around 5:30, after not sleeping I realized the trains were up again so I split. Got back in around 7. So tired. Slept until 4PM. So tonight in that line...I'm going out to a goth club which runs from Midnight -5. ROCK! I'll write more tomorrow!
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