This weekend i headed to Tokyo 東京 for a number of different reasons, but mostly to meet up with my brother who i managed to visit in the first 10 weeks or so that i've been in Japan 日本.
Anyhoo i caught the local train down from Shirakawa白河. It takes about 3.5 hours if you are lucky. there are at least 3 but sometimes more train changes along the way, so you really need to timetables to lineup. However it does cost half as much as catching the Shinkansen 新幹線, so If you have the time it saves you a bit of cash.
On Friday 金曜日 night i met up with Yuki, who i have also not visited in Tokyo. she has this awesome pad just outside Roppongi 六本木. Its quite strange as there isn't really a wall between the bathroom/shower and the rest of the apartment, there's only a glass wall which has a curtain on the outside. We had the standard japanese night out, comprised of an izakaya followed by karaoke.
Saturday 土曜日 morning was the run for the curefun run around the Imperial Palace, so i had to wake up earlyish which isn't fun. To make things worse, i had managed to forget my shorts in Shirakawa, leaving me to scamper around Tokyo looking for any kind of clothing store which sold shorts. Sadly i was unsuccessful.. so i had to do the run in boxers =p no one seemed to noticed and/or care so it all worked out. The race had a high percentage of gaijin, maybe half, but thats ok i guess. Normally when i run in races i finish somewhere in the middle of the pack.. but in this race i sprinted out to the front like a w*nker, and seriously not that many people overtook me. This race strangely had no time keepers or listing of finishing positions.. but I guesstimate that i finished somewhere between 10th and 15th out of a few hundred people. We also suspect that Darren finished 5th or there abouts.
Running a fun run is all good, cept when its the first activity in a very long day. And this was to be a very long day. We spent the best part of the afternoon attempting to find a public bath to soak in, but we had no luck and then resorted to finding any place to sleep. We entered a capsule カプスル hotel, but were rejected for being baka gaijin who couldn't speak nihongo. In the end we just headed back to Yuki's, where i managed to have a brief shower, and also coin the phrase "i feel like i've been sleeping under a coffee table". which basically means you feel like your bones/muscles etc are sore from some sort of crampedness. but i got it from actually sleeping under a coffee table =p
Next was dinner with my brother, his gf, Yuki, Chito and Darren. we went to this shanghai dumpling place which we had a lot of trouble finding. but it turned out to be pretty awesome. You don't find a whole lot of decent chinese food in Fukushima 福島 so this was a nice change. We finished a lot later than we had planned, but the schedule seemed to work itself out in the end.
Onwards to Gan Ban 08.. we met up with a bunch of others from Fukushima and some train station which is most of the way to Chiba and we quickly boozed up at a conbini. Inside the concert can best be described as epic.. it felt like it was a mini festival inside like a massive aircraft hangar. The Djs totally rocked out too.. Basement Jaxx and Justice were the ones we came to see with Justice being the most awesome live set ive maybe ever seen or heard. The backdrop was a big screen featuring such trippy imagery as Fantasia and Alice in Wonderland.... seriously Lewis Carroll must've been on some pretty hard stuff..
One of the doods who was with us (i forget his name) was wearing like a tshirt with a graph with jived to the music.. and he pretty much had everyone person in the place come and talk to him about it. he was also a crazy awesome dancer, so usually he was like "get away from me im trying to dance here", even to the super hawt jgirls who came to talk to him.
whilst the concert was awesome.. the trip home was not so much. Apart from only partially lucid, i managed to somehow drop a super cheesy mcdonalds megamuffin all over my pants at about 6:30am. not fun. during the almost 3 hours we were in maccas, there was a single jgirl there sitting right at the end of the bench.. and the whole time we were there (plus time before we arrived, and after we left) she was just doing he hair and make up.. like she had OCD.. it was bizarro.. although probably moreso since i was only partially awake.
unlike D though, i was able to get some zzz's on a table in maccas as well as on the bus ride back to Fukushima. I was kept hydrated by a Thorpedo(tm) drink courtesy of D. In the afternoon.. i had yet more rest.. as well a super hot date.. but more on that in the other blog....
:: vocabulary words ::
Shinkansen = bullet train.. very fast but pricey
conbini = convenience store
Chiba = a city to the east of Tokyo
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