Brent's Blog

Brent's Japan adventure, Part 2

11:15 AM June 19th, Tokyo; 7:15 PM June 18th, Arizona
I'm on the bus typing this right now halfway through the day. I'll add some more when I get a chance this afternoon. Today we woke up about 6:30 and went across the street from the hotel to the 7-11 to get some stuff we forgot to pack. They of course had merchandise that appeared totally foreign to us. I bought some cheesecake flavored pocky. After breakfast we went to the Imperial Palace. So after looking at the entrance to Imperial Palace we went to a Temple (I think it was Buddhist). In front of the temple they had a large gate and a huge outdoor market. I broke down in a store and bought a katana. It was pretty cheap, only about 11000 yen, but it looked neat with a steel blade and on the sheath was black with a golden emblem of the Tokugawa Shogunate. The lady in the store seemed impressed when I knew the history of the Tokugawa. I've taken lots more pictures today of course. Right now we are on our way to the Roppongi district, which I'm told, is the "hip" district of Japan, with lots of clubs, music stores, and upscale resturants. It's amazing how long it takes to get anywhere in Tokyo. The city is huge in addition to being very crowded, Think of New York congestion in the entire Phoenix metro area. It's like that.

Vending Machine Watch, day 2: seen lots of vending machines so far. Icluding many cigarette vending machines and one beer machine. So far I have not sighted that elusive vending machine of lore (you know the one), I shall continue my vigil.

10:43 PM June 19th, Tokyo; 6:43 AM June 19th, Arizona
Ok I thought the Roppongi Hills district sounded familiar, turns out I saw a show about the main building in the district on the Discovery channel not too long ago. The big tower is supposed to be really futuristic and a whole community in one building it was built on the "vertical city" concept. I was really excited to be there, but the buiding is closed to the public unless you take a horrendusly expensive tour. So Brandon and I managed to get into an elevator that only went to a provate club on the 51st floor, oops. After that we walked to lunch at the Hard Rock Cafe, wow amazing Japanese cusine. After Lunch we hopped back on the tour bus and visited a shrine to the Emperor Meiji, the shrine was really expansive, there was a long path through a heavily wooded area to get there, and a very large gate at the entrance of the shrine. We hung around there for a while and watched a wedding procession that was going on. We also got our shrine books stamped. The Shrine books are neat, you buy the book with blank pages for 1000 yen (about then dollars) and then at most temples and shrines you visit you can pay between three and five dollars to have them "stamp" your book with a page full of calligraphy. It looks really neat, but with all the shrines we are going to visit I fear it will become quite the investment.

After visiting the Meiji shrine we went to a shopping districft that I was told is very popular with Tokyo's youth. To get the the district we had to cross a bridge near the shrine that was clogged with young people dressed up for lack of a better word oddly. Like Anime Expo got combined with a hooker convention. There we permutations of dress there that no rational mind would seemingly be able to conceive. Of the "clothing" latex seemed very popular along with the color black, and some military uniforms (I think there were supposed to be WWII era Japanese uniforms). At the same time we also saw a procession of large vehicles blaring some loud march music roll by. I first assumed they were connected with the wedding we had seen earlierm, but our local guide informed us that they were protesting against the government. Come to think of it, that music did kinda have a "communist march" feel to it. Nor did the day get less strange there. The shopping district we went to was stores mostly concerned with fasion, but there we some less reputable establishments thrown into the mix. Some members of our group unwittingly wandered into a strip club (moral of the story: don't follow the well dressed buisnessmen). And Brandon and I tried to get into Condomania (scroll down for picture, I shit you not this place was real) but in addition to being crammed with condoms that store was freaking crowded with people and we really didn't want to push our way in there, or try to get into the "Love Girl Store" next door, so we wandered back to the meeting spot. After meeting with the rest of the group we took the train to the Shinjuku District for dinner. I'm told Shinjuku was near the center of Tokyo, it sure seemed like it. Shinjuku is probably what you think of when you imagine Tokyo. There was lots of lights, lots of nightlife, and a crapload of Pachinko parlors. I wouldn't call it a red light district but it seemed to be a place you wanted to be a little more careful around, and there were a few stores that while their purpose was not immediatly obvious to the Japanese-illiterate, they did have english signs inside that proclaimed them to be a "men's theme park", I'm sure you can make some educated guesses. After dinner we took the train back to the hotel, the trains are very crowded, seemingly at all hours of the day. Anyways we stopped at a music and movie store in the train station. I checked out some of the anime dvds, but it was 6,000 yen for one anime dvd! That's almost three times as much as the US! So much for buying anime while I'm here. After shopping again we returned to the hotel and now here I am writing this. I'll try to post it as soon as I can, hopefully tomorrow morning.

8:10 AM June 20th, Tokyo; 4:10 PM June 19th, Arizona
We had a small earthquake last night, only one person in our group noticed it and we thought they were making it up until we got to breakfast this morning and everyone in the hotel was talking about it. Too bad I slept through it.

P.S. if anyone has anything they want me to get while I'm here, just let me know and if I see it I'll pick it up.

¶ 4:28 PM

1 Comments:

I wish we went to a "theme park", we did see lots of them. We finished dinner at about 8:30 and as we walked out I saw people in suits lying in the streets. So yeah, it did get a little seedy.

Pachinko is just gambling, except you pay real money for fake money to gamble with and then turn the prizes you win with the fake money back into real money, so it isn't technically gambling.

By Brent, at 6/28/2005 05:16:00 AM

1 Comments:

Random Picture:

Current Reading

What I'm playing