The Tokyo Syndrome

Tokyo has got to be the strangest city I've ever been to. It's like New York, California, Chicago, old-Japan-town, and small-European-town rolled into one. It's got massive buildings, old temples and shrines, crazy new technology, small windy roads with little bakeries, an ocean...and a lot of people.

When I left my family kinda was just like "yeah yeah, bye bye. See you later." and they all went out to work at night and I left by myself. I wasn't looking for a big "goodbye" but I mean, I was going to Tokyo for the first time EVER. Everyone elses mom made them food for the bus and gave them other goodies. But that's ok!. I took a night bus there. As far as money goes...that was a great idea. 6800 Yen (About $65.00) round trip. The bullet train costs, at the cheapest, about $140.00. We left Nagoya at 10:30 at night and arrived in Tokyo an hour early...at 5:15 in the morning. It was dark out, freezing cold, and nothing was opened. We walked aorund for a while looking for food. Eventually made it to the Hostel 4 hours early, dropped our bags off and walked around our area. We were 1 block away from here...



which lead to here..



I went clubbing for the first time in my life only to learn that Japanese people are worse at dancing than me. This is a great feeling because I looked like a dance machine sent from the future to teach Japan how to move and how to groove to the techno rhythms they seem to love soooooo much. We left, went home, chatted with our Irish and English roommates and then crashed. The next morning we woke up, walked around Asakusa (our area in Tokyo) and then we just wen all over pretty much... in a very loose order we went to the following places...

Ueno Park - we watched lots of great performers perform music, doing circus acts, sing songs. We went a beautiful old art museum that you could spend a week in and still not see all of it.

Shibuya - The most crowde city I've ever been in. It was a constant sea of people, lots of bright flashy lights and giant monitors on buildings. We got delicious cake and dinner food and looked in all of these weird stores. My favorite went from selling garden hoses to sex toys and everything in between.

Harajuku - This places, on weekends, has a bunch of teenagers who dress up in whacky costumes and face paint and hair and stuff. Some are anime characters, some are "ganguro" or "Yamanba", come have signs that say "Free Hugs." There's also people who go there to protest this and say it negatively reflects Japanese culture. this is Ganguro/Yamanda...



Afterwards we went to a Kaitenzushi (the place where the sushi is on the rotating belt thing and you eat all you can.) If there isn't a piece of Sushi on belt that's on the menu you just ask a chef to make it for you and he'll do so. There was one on the menu called Shirakogunkan. Gunkan is a kind of sushi, for instance the ones with the orange salmon eggs..that's gunkan. Now take out the orange eggs and put in a whitish brain looking thing. That's Shirako. My friend Masako dared me to get one so I ordered it and threw it back in one bite. Neither of us had any idea what it REALLY was. i immediately felt like vomiting and faught my gag reflex with all my pride. I settled on moving it to the side of my mouth and slowly swallowed parts of it for about 2 minutes until it was gone. It wasn't bad tasting really, the consitancy was just digusting. It was cold and kind of mushy. Shira means "white" and "ko" means "child" or "children" anotehr Japanese person told me she thought it was part of the female reproductive system. Current research tells me, it's a type of fish Sperm. I ate fish sperm. I want to make sure you all get this. I ate fish sperm sushi. In one bite.

Capsule Hotel... we landed in Akihabara at 9 at night. We had our bags and everything. Walked into the Capsule hotel and immediately realized there was no way in hell we'd be sleeping there. It was dirty and scary and I expected to see a bloody capsule. I didn't, but I thought it might be fitting. We turned around, called our hostel and they let us back in with welcoming arms. I was really scared of the capsule hotel. REALLY scared. Maybe I'll give a second try when I know for sure that it's safe.

Finally, I got home to Toyotashi and walked in. My mom immediately started apologizing to me. Apparently what happened was she thought I was going out with my friends that night and the next morning when I wasn't home, she thought I'd missed the last train home. She called me but I didn't get the message til I got back to Toyotashi. She gave me $50.00 and said "I was going to give this to you for spending money! I'm SO sorry!!!!" then she gave me Chocolate filled with whisky and another kind of Chocolate for Valentines Day. Yeaaaaaaaah.

I'll write more about Tokyo speficics later...