They say it was the worst typhoon in ten years, but nothing was gonna stop me from going into Tokyo!

I left Chris' place in the late morning, and got on a local train for the 2 hour ride.

This was my first time in Tokyo alone, so I kind of thought that maybe I could hang out underground, like the big underground malls in Nagoya. But there really isn't anything underground in Shibuya, where I decided to go. Everything seemed to be far from the station, and I had no umbrella, and the rain was REALLY BAD. In the end, I waited for the rain to die down a little, and then I walked around. I found a street with bright lights and thought, "Well, something exciting's gotta come from there". So I started to walk down that street. On my left, I noticed a sex shop and thought to myself "Oh, so they do have real sex shops in Japan," and kept walking, the thought never crossing my mind that this might be one of the seedier sides of Shibuya. As I kept walking, I noticed that the bright lights were usually advertising some club where the pictures outside are of girls in school uniforms, but with their eyes blacked out. Then I realised that this was probably the reason why all the middle-aged men walking down this street were looking at me funny. I mean, I was walking alone, so what was I doing there?

I have a "thing" where even if I realise that I'm going the wrong way, I'll keep walking straight, to the end of the street so as not to interrupt the flow of my walking, and also probably so i don't look like an idiot walking backwards.

Unfortunately, this is a really long street, with love hotels all around, and as I went down the twists and turns I wondered if I'd get lost when I reached the end. I didn't, but I was pretty far from where I started. I was in the main shopping area, so I decided to go into those stores, and look at things until my friends called. I was in a bookstore when I got a call and was told that we were meeting in Shibuya. So, I was far from the station, the rain was significantly heavier, and I had no umbrella. I stood in the doorway of a bookstore looking out at the rain for a long time before I realised that there was no way that I could "wait out" this rain, because it'd probably go on like this all through the night. The only way was to run.

When I was in Nagoya one day in August, it was sprinkling lightly, and a pimp came up to me and offered to shelter me while we both crossed the road. Now that I think about it, maybe he thought I was Japanese and he wanted to recruit me, but at the time I just thought he was a friendly guy who had an umbrella and saw that I was standing in the rain. Now I'm standing in this crazy storm in Tokyo, and not one person offers me an umbrella. Instead most people are staring at me like "That crazy girl hasn't got an umbrella in this rain!" And I'd wandered pretty far from the station so by the time I got there I was soaked.

Then there was the problem of finding my friends' location in Shinjuku. They told me they were in Starbucks, but there are about a million Starbucks in Shinjuku! So there were many phone calls with "What can you see?" "Give me new directions because these ones aren't working" Finally they said they could see a Takashimaya Times Square sign, so I went there, and it turns out they could SEE it, but they were actually on the other side of the train tracks. In the end, a couple of them had to pick me up from Lumine. They had umbrellas too.

Tokyo is really big on those clear plastic umbrellas with white plastic handles. Unfortunately most of them are cheap and from the hundred-yen shop...so they couldn't stand the typhoon winds. In many places that night, the mangled umbrellas were discarded on the side of the road. In some places, people lined them up, like a mass of disfigured bodies, left to be later identified by family members.

We got to the Liquid Room as people were lining up, a couple of the guys were on the door, but they'd have to get Joe to get an extra 4 passes for us to get in. We waited for a couple of hours, bumming around outside, at the amusement centre next door, and coming up with really stupid things to do to pass the time. Two hours passed, it was 9pm, and people started leaving because the show was over. ***Then*** we get our passes, and we get to meet Joe Strummer, which isn't exactly the most exciting experience for me, but it's so funny to watch his Japanese fans line up to take a picture and say a few words to him. There's much confusion as to what we're supposed to do next, if we're going to join him for dinner, or some bar...and in the end someone had to call someone who was going to call us and tell us what bar we were going to at about 1? It was kind of like some thing that didn't sound like they cared about whether we turned up to or not (well, they didn't), but since we had nothing better to do and we weren't going to go home until the next morning, we were gonna go. We jumped on a train and subway to Naka-Meguro, and went around asking everyone for Bar 1O1. Taxi drivers didn't seem to know, but some convenie guy took out a map and found it for us, it was just down the road. So we had to go kill time, and found a tiny little bar about 20 metres away. There were only about ten bar stools, and it was cool. We went in and got some drinks, and talked to the couple who were working there that night, Yuki and Makoto. They let us pick which CDs to put in the stereo, and we're singing along to NOFX in this bar.

Then Joe Strummer arrives in 101, and we have to go to show our appreciation for the passes, so we tell Yuki and Makoto that he's just down the road. They get so excited, and Yuki is so nervous that she's about to cry (she's so cute). So we go to 101, with Yuki, and she gets to meet him, and take a picture with him. She's so happy, it's great.

After Joe leaves, we go back to Yuki and Makoto's bar for one more drink, and then we say our goodbyes. There's a building across the street with a small balcony where we can take shelter for the next couple of hours until the first trains start running so we can go home. But Yuki comes out and asks us where we're staying. We point across the street, and she thinks we have friends who live in the building, but we explain that we don't. So she and Makoto invite us to stay at their house, all of us! It's so nice of them, and we say yes (well, we have nowhere to go) and catch cabs back to their place. They have a small, but really really nice place, and only one bed. With all 8 of us in the apartment we fill up every space, the guys are sleeping on the kitchen floor and in the hallway too. We don't sleep til really late because everyone is talking and having fun, but I fall (in and out of) sleep pretty early.

I wake up pretty early too, and everyone is deeply asleep. By 10.30 it's time for me to go, because I want to explore a little more of Tokyo before I have to go home on the train, and I try to wake someone up. Since Yuki is the only other girl, I assume she'll wake up if I shake her a little, but she doesn't. So no one knows when I leave.

Now comes the problem of how I find my way anywhere, because we caught a cab here. The weather is perfectly sunny and beautiful, and hot too. So my plan is to follow the streets until I see some powerlines that look like train lines and then follow those until I reach a station. It works, I reach some random subway station, and get home in one piece.

I didn't get to see Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros but I still had a great weekend.