GW Wrap Up, Back to Twerk
Golden Week’s already over.
So yeah, on Thursday went to LaLaPort in the daytime. Had lunch at the Shakey’s there, where Nick had the balls the challenge me to a pizza eating contest. It was a grueling match, with me defeating Nick as he was nearly in tears with his 14 slices of pizza. I had 15 slices, and claimed victory as the Shakey’s Champion. Afterwards, we both felt rightfully ill and I spent the rest of the day digesting. Nick somehow needed the rest of the week to do this. Anyway, that night we went to hang out in Chiba with Sato-san at an Izakaya. I was still full of pizza, so it was hard to do anything but rock back and forth. Either way, it was a fun night that ended up with Nick trying his eyebrow-slicked “hey hey kanojo” pickup line on random old women outside of Chiba station. And when I say old, I mean like over 50. Pretty gross. He was joking, at least I think (and hope).
On Friday, headed into Tokyo and checked out Shinjuku, Harajuku, and the Meiji Shrine. Brian met up with us after recovering from a week of being tourguide, and we walked down Takeshita street. UNFORTUNATELY at some point during the walk back from Meiji to the end of Takeshita, I realized I had dropped and lost my sunglasses. Rest in peace, trusty old black aviators. We had a lot of good times. Anyways, me, Nick, and Brian wanted to hit up Tabasa for dinner, since we were in the mood for some all-you-can-eat hip hop and jelly, but the line was super long and we opted to go around the corner to a very similar (looking) place offering all-you-can-eat pasta and pizza and stuff. Big mistake. The place we went to, called Gonzo’s or something Italian with a G, had sub-par cold food, pizza that was hard as a rock, and not even any hip hop. Add on top of that a fat Russian waitress who could barely speak English let alone Japanese, and a table of lowlife hippie types who came in about 30 minutes after us, and you can see that I will never go to a Harajuku pasta buffet ever again that is not named Tabasa.
After eating, we walked around Kabukicho for a bit, looked around, and got harassed by some Nigerian princes who wanted us to come to their clubs. Mainly we just went to a few arcades there, and realized that karaoke would be too expensive at this early in the evening. Thus, we went to Shibuya around 10PM to kill some time before finding an all-night karaoke spot. Went to The Lockup*, which was actually pretty sweet although there were no jail breaks or monsters. The nomihoudai was decent, and about the same price as a normal izakaya. We had the Electric Shocks first, which were as bad as before. After that, went to a Shibuya branch of Utahiro; not the one I went to last time in Shibuya, and it was a nice place. Did that all night, during which time I was given permission to use Nick’s phone to be a jerk to his ex; some yakuza-speaking girl who didn’t believe I wasn’t Japanese. It was pretty funny. After karaoke ended at 5, hit up McDonalds for some breakfast, saw some cops get all riled up because of a security alarm going off, and then headed back home. All in all a good Shibuya all nighter.
*Note: I uploaded my first YouTube video; us entering The Lockup. There are automated traps and stuff that are supposed to scare you. I took it with my new camera, so it’s pretty shaky, dark, and terrible, but hey, it’s online.
After getting home around 7 and sleeping for a few hours, Nick headed back to Hyogo via Shinkansen. I slept some more and headed to Chiba to hang with Brian for the usual family restaurant/arcade excursion. We ended up finding a trick to one of the UFO Catcher-type machines, and ended up walking away with an entire bag each of plastic Mario Mushrooms. Pretty awesome. Sunday hit up Global Viking again, and saw Spider-Man 3 again. It was totally worth it for the Venom scene, and also since Blanchard and I used our IU IDs to get student tickets.
Today, Tuesday, I started back up at work. It’s seriously rough having 9 days off, with complete freedom, fun, etc, then having to haul back into work. I couldn’t even speak slow enough to my first student today, so for the first half of class he had no idea what I was saying. I’m not going to write more about work now, since it will make me depressed. Tomorrow I have to wake up early and go to the head office in Shinjuku for a workshop. Yippy skippy.
