March 26-Tokyo Decadence
My Tuesday morning started out like it would have any other week…except well…actually, scratch that! It started out like no other day except for possibly July 29th last summer…ya know what? Forget out it…I’ll just tell you what happened. OHHHHH!!!! SNAP!!!!! The Raptones just came on! Well…that’s it! Now I know I’m in Japan! Hhahahhahaha…this show is so funny. When I watch this show I can almost taste scramble eggs with butter on them and ham. Ok, you’re probably really confused right now. Ok, this is a show that my little host sisters and host brother watched every morning when I was staying with them. And my host mother would always make me the same thing for breakfast (see above) and I would always end up eating breakfast just as the previous show was ending and this one came on, and that was the exact same situation here. Although I don’t have any breakfast this time….dag yo…I’m hungry. But…I’m kinda lazy and I don’t really feel like getting up and out and looking for food now. I’m probably gonna lose some weight while I’m here in funny land (Japan). All I ate yesterday was a bottle of Pocari Sweat and a bottle of Dakara (both Gatorade type sports drinks and then for dinner I had a bowl of pork curry rice last night. When I was on the train back from Shibuya last night going to Shinjuku, I got it in my head that I wanted to have some curry rice. Of course I wanted to find a Coco-ichiban Curry place but after walking around the hive of sin, crime, sketchy characters, and decadence that is Kabukicho for about half an hour, my head was in a blur and I probably would have been better off having holy water for dinner to clense myself. So, I didn’t really care about Coco-ichiban anymore and I just wanted some curry. So I ended up going to another curry place (Sorry Coco-Ichiban..I still love you!) called Pot&Pot…what a dumb name, but their curry was fine. I went back to the hotel Tateshina afterwards and I was really tired. I just wanted to lie down. And I was cold too because I had dressed for the afternoon’s weather, which was pretty warm, but by the time I was heading home, my t-shirt proved to be inadequate for keeping me warm. Then I ended up standing at the front desk while the dude behind the counter tried…about….35 times (no exaggeration) to swipe my credit card to charge me for the room with no success. So, just to get him to leave me alone I payed him in cash…not like I had any other choice. When I got upstairs, I tried to type a journal entry or something on the laptop, but I feel unconscious (not asleep) before I could get anything done. So when I regained consciousness around 11pm, I turned off the light and went to sleep. It was warm in the room so I woke up around 2am and I opened the window and I ended up waking up around 7:30am (today-Thursday-27th).
But I never got to yesterday. It’s funny how these things are when I write them…I wonder if anyone is reading these things. So yesterday after I got up, checked out of the hotel Tobu Narita, I went back to the airport to get on the Narita Express (an express train from Narita airport to main points in Tokyo. On the train I ended up talking to an elderly man and woman (not husband and wife, but they were sitting together). Yes, we spoke in Japanese. They were just asking me about where I came from, what I was doing in Japan, etc etc. They were very nice. The man got off the train at Tokyo station and the woman was staying on until Shinjuku like me. We ended up talking about the Sakura (Japanese cherry blossoms) and the war in Iraq. She raised the topic of war, not me. She just was just curious to hear what I thought about it. So we exchanged a few words of sympathy for innocent Iraqis (sp?) who would be affected by the conflict and for the unfortunate nature of war. Once I got to Shinjuku I had to find my hotel. I had a map (without which, I would still be looking for the hotel). Just outside the station was a truck with some guys standing on the roof with a megaphone staging an anti-war rally. There wasn’t really a crowd there listening to them, it was more like there were a lot of people there anyway because it’s the busiest train station in the world. As I walked down the sidewalk behind the truck, I felt like a midget in a urinal as I was flanked by men handing out anti-war flyers. No one said anything to me, but I decided that if they asked me what I thought of the war or of President Bush, I was going to tell them that I’m German and then I’d say a few words in German. Hehehehe. After I found my hotel and checked in, I walked off in search of an ATM machine. The guy behind the desk had swiped my card about 20 times before giving up. I think I tried about half the ATMs in Tokyo before I found one that would actually give me money. So I think I’m going to go back there and take out as much money as I can before I leave in case I can’t find another ATM that accepts my card.
Then I went to Shibuya and I hung out with my friend Kozue. That was fun because since the weather was nice, there were about a million people in Shibuya. Some young up-start types had put a sign around Hachiko’s neck that said (Stop War!) in big red letters. I should probably explain Hachiko. It’s a pretty sad story, so go get some tissues. Back in the 1930s there was a guy who had a dog. And the guy had to go off to war. Every day while the guy was gone, his dog would walk to Shibuya station (where the guy had left) and check to see if the guy had returned. The guy was eventually killed in battle. But, the dog continued coming to the station every day for 10 years waiting for his master. The dog made the trip to the station until his death. I’ll bet the tears are flowing now! In memory of the dog’s devotion, a small statue of the dog was put on the spot outside the station in 1936. Since then, it has become a very colorful area and THE meeting place in Tokyo. Oh! That reminds me! I fulfilled another one of the Japan dreams yesterday. I met Kozue at Hachiko! That was cool. I felt so Japanese hehehehe. Anyway, that was fun and yesterday was cool.
So now I’m still lying in bed and it’s about a quarter of 9am here (8:45pm in New Jerseyt. If I were home now, I’d probably be sitting at my desk talking to someone on the computer and not really doing much of anything. Oh! I might be eating too. I do a lot of eating. Instead, I’m going to get dressed for another fun day in the Tokyo sun! I’m hungry…oh dag, yo! My tea water has been heating for about an hour! Whoops! I’d better go take care of that. I think today I’m going to go to Harajuku (I’ve never been there) or maybe I’ll go to Ueno Park to see if I can see some cherry blossoms. That’d be cool. I’ll let you know later what I ended up doing. Byebye!!!
-Maikeru