Ack, no. Not morning. Well, truth be told, I'm ready to go back. It kind of feels like I've been here for at least a month or so. The things that blew me away in the beginning are kind of a norm now, and I'm used to saying "Thank you", "excuse me", and "one yakisoba, if you please" in Japanese. All good things come to an end…for a while anyways, right? I need to go back and make some more money so I can come back.
The sun seemed especially bright this morning as Jean and I slowly packed up our goods and I had a delicious breakfast of senbei and sakusakupanda. The kind people at the ryokan said they'd let us leave our luggage there until the afternoon as we wanted to check out the happenings at Tokyo Dome.
I don't know how I would have ever found our ryokan without Jean having been here before. It's stuffed way in the back down an alley and nothing is in English.
We did some lunch and then checked out the baked goods at the 'Dome.
The roller coaster looked pretty dang cool, but I had no one to ride with. Boo.
Long story short, Tokyo Dome wasn't anything spectacular. We were both outta money, so the mall was no good and the rides were expensive. AND they had no crepes, which I wanted! We wandered back to the ryokan and picked up our luggage and began our haul to Tokyo station where I was to catch the Narita Express to the airport.
Remember this sign from day 1? Everything's come full circle!...and it sucks. Boo.
Jean and I said goodbye and she headed off back to Hino and I began my last hours in Japan alone. I boarded my train (where some old white guy finally asked ME for help! It was usually the other way around. No big deal.) As I sat on the train, I stared out past every district we sailed through and tried to detach myself this trip. It was a bittersweet arrival back on the platform where I had left 14 days earlier.
Shizz! When I arrived I found out my plane had been given a "new departure time" (the pleasant Japanese way of saying "Delayed".) The plane was coming from Toronto and there had been a snowstorm or something. Given that I now had five hours before departing, I took it upon myself to discover the shopping opportunities at Narita and have my last meal.
Man, this almost brought me to tears! I sought out a Lawson's crammed in the back corner of the airport and found my now-favorite Japanese meal. I ate it out on the observation deck with Japanese people milling about watching the planes come and go. I did some more shopping (finding the most kick-ass souvenir for B-Mal) and bought a magazine featuring Ryu to gawk at (because we all know I can't read it.) Security took only about 10 minutes and then I had quite a hike to my gate, stopping to stare at Hermes bags and cell phone charms along the way. This was it. As I sat on the plane and stared out hoping for one last look of the lights of Tokyo, the air traffic control people on the ground began waving as the plane started.
Ahh. Good night's sleep? Eh, not so much. I don't call sleeping from 7:30 AM until noon a good sleep, but I'll take what I can get. So much to do, so little time – Ryuhei awaits! Jean and I are splitting up today until dinner. I'm going to Shibuya to see Ryuhei Matsuda's new movie, Akumu Tantei (Nightmare Detective). This is was the movie we were trying to watch on Wednesday night, but no theatre was playing it. Since I was so determined, I meticulously scrubbed the internet in Japanese until a theatre came out of the woodwork. Arriving in Shibuya, it was really close to the station, so I had no problems finding it. I had a bit of a hard time buying a ticket since it wasn't like a usual movie theatre, so anything they explained to me in Japanese received a "Hai" from me, even though I had freaking idea what was going on.
The theatre was only playing this movie so they had movie paraphernalia, caps, a giant posterboard full of articles and…gasp…a signed poster by Ryu. I'm such a fangirl. The movie was alright, but very strange, as a lot of Japanese movies are. People keep on dying in their sleep as they are being attacked by a blobby-ish thing but to the people around the sleeping person, they see the sleeping person stabbing themselves in the neck. Um, it was gross. Lots of cutting and blood and people trying to stay awake.
After the movie I headed straight over to Ginza and discovered that the street had been closed. Not quite time to meet Jean yet, I decided to just wander and take some photos.
Uniqro!
Yes, that is a crown on my head. It is very fitting considering where we went for dinner.
Man…I'm doing some serious name-dropping here. Bling bling.
My favorite name brand of all…Goo. No big deal.
Me and Jean then met and took the elevator up to my most anticipated restaurant experience of the trip…
As soon as you walk in, you are greeted with a pink rug that has "Princess Heart" emblazoned across it and the waitresses, girls dressed up in Lolita maid costumes, give you a chipper, "Welcome to the Party!" As you walk up the stairs up to the restaurant decorated with elf statues, you stop in front of a mirror on the wall and the waitress says that you should check your outfit to make sure you are dressed for the party. Confused and without an extra change of clothing, Jean and I agree we are dressed to party.
We came down pretty quick when we looked at the menu prices and were then told by our sweet little waitress that we have to order at least one drink and they prefer two. Glancing at the drink menu, the cheapest was 850 yen. Um…
This one was called 'the Seven Dwarfs'. As in usual Japanese fashion, the drinks were pretty watered-down, but tasty.
This was our dessert…kawaii! We ordered the set-o (set menu) for $30, and it was really good. I was definitely full and spent a lot of money.
I then decided that I needed some more socks, a crepe and another purikura, so where did we go? Harajuku.
Mine was filled with strawberries and ice cream. Oishi!
After enjoying my last taste of Japanese nightlife, we headed back to Hongo-Sanchome (our stop) and did some more karaoke. It would seem as though Japanese people get really worried when they see two white girls come in…they get all confused and can't reasonably conclude that we want to sing (at least judging my their confused looks they give one another.) Um…and apparently most people don't drink coffee when they karaoke, because when I ordered it, they snickered. After getting our room, some guys from Norway or whatever invited us for a beer, which we turned down since we were in the thick of a Good Charlotte song (thankyouverymuch).
After getting back to the ryokan, Jean went to use the intaneto and I went to take some pictures of our peculiar residence.
Our dining room
Futons
Doors to dining room
Our front gate
Down the hall from us
Hall to the washroom and hot bath
The party room
Random sink in hallway
Tomorrow, I'm gone…but we still have some fun before that. I'm feeling really sad about the whole situation. Vacations are so unfair.
I was sad to get up today. I have to leave my little Tokyo home (I've stayed here the majority of my time – 8 nights total.) After breakfast, some last minute shopping in Tachikawa (I found out they had a Vivienne Westwood store at Granduo!), I packed up my shit and checked out, only to say "irashai masen" to the girl when leaving (it means "Welcome Here".) D'oh. I also decided that this business across the street was amusing:
Everytime we saw one of those over-tanned guys, we joked that they have been spending too much time at Blacky. I also saw one later that was called 'Browny'.
Heading to the station to meet Jean at noon, I had to say goodbye to Tachikawa.
Once we arrived at Shinjuku, Jeaner went to go pick up her day pass and I observed how Tokyoians spend the majority of their days – on the train.
When Japanese people get on the train, they do one of two things – flip open their cell phone and begin emailing or sleep. This picture shows the creatures in their natural habitat.
After hauling our (my) loads of crap from one train to the next and then on an uphill, 15-minute walk to the ryokan (by this time Jean had heard more than her share of my potty-mouth), we then hauled our cookies off to Odaiba, the seaside town of Tokyo.
We took the subway until we could connect with the only train that went all the way to Odaiba, the Monorail. And I sang the monorail song by the Simpsons not only on the way there, but on the way back too.
This is the infamous 'RainbowBridge'. Our monorail went right through it. No big deal.
This is the Fuji television building at Odaiba. I know my key to superstardom is within the confines of that building in the Mezanyu footage. Sigh. So close yet so far away.
Yes, it's the same thing. No, it's smaller than the real one.
Tokyo across the bay from Odaiba.
I was so jazzed to go on the World's Largest Ferris Wheel! It goes around once every 16 minutes, and at a cost of $9.00 for the ride, it was SO worth the $.56 per minute.
Jean her suitcase that she bought that came along with us everywhere we went that day. Best. I named it 'the Kid'. I probably could have come up with something a little bit more clever. The Japanese people operating the ride were really thrown off by the fact that we had this suitcase coming along with us. At least we didn't have to pay for an extra ticket.
This is Tokyo Big Sight – Tokyo's convention centre.
After the ferris wheel, we headed into the Toyota showroom…sugoi!
They had these little hybrid self-driving cars that you can take for a spin on the track for $2.00 per person - oh you know we were all about that business!
I got to "drive".
They also had lots of weird crap painted on the sides of these cars. This was ours zipping by. We left 'the Kid' off this one – no room for the little shyster. It was so fun! And kind of freaky.
They had all kinds of cool/fun stuff to do here for the big kids.
We were running out of time, so we decided to head to the mall to check out a night in Venice…
Yeaaah, basically the neat-o-gang-iest mall I've ever been in.
We then jammed back over to the monorail (…monoraaaail!.....monoraaaaail!) and went back to our ryokan to jam down some goods and primp for our big night out, hitting the clubs in Roppongi.
(More about the ryokan tomorrow.)
So healthy! (Not pictured: Giant box of cookies.)
We dressed in our fun-yet-entirely-covering clothing and headed over to Shinjuku for 9:00 PM to meet up with Keren and the gang. They weren't at the "usual" spot, so we hiked over to the Studio Alta building to see if they were there. It was raining and the lady at the ryokan had lent us some sturdy-but-large umbrellas, so we were prepared. When I passed people, I would try to not smack them with my umbrella. Upon passing this one man, I believe he was unaware I was as far left as I could go as I was against a wall and I ended but stabbing him in the ear with the edge of my umbrella. He screamed and held his ear. Poor guy.After not finding Keren and the crew (which included this nice Japanese girl who said I looked like someone "who listens to heavy rock music and drinks a lot") for an hour, we finally stumbled upon them back at the "usual" spot…they were just really late. Nice. And off we trekked to Roppongi.
After getting to Roppongi, we were lost. Since I was going with a crew of locals, I'd assumed they would know their way. Nope. We wandered for about half an hour, finally showing up at a club called "Vanilla" around 11:30. The name should have been an indicator for us that it would be stacked full of mostly white people. The music was crap, the dance floor was crap and there was smoking and grossy white army boys everywhere you looked. The trains stopped at midnight and we should've/would've left if the cover hadn't been $20. Fast forward to 2:30 AM – Jean and I are hovering in the "Ladies Only" section, trying to avoid this guy who keeps hitting on Jean and napping a bit. We finally decide we've gotten all we wanted to get out of our money's worth and take it to the streets until the trains start up again at 5:15 AM. As we leave, we see a line-up outside. Why?!?! Why!?!? Anyways…
We head over to the nearest Lawson's (a convenience store) and pick up some steam buns, a tonkatsu sandwich, and some chocolate biscuits and we gorge. That took all of 5 minutes…now what? A couple shops down from the Lawsons we find a restaurant…that is open until 5AM! Whoo hoo! Now stuffed with food, we decide that more food is the answer to all of our problems. We sat in half-sleep mode and munched on some soup, fries, etc, listening to this clearly drunk couple from the club (the clubbies kept trickling in as the night wore on) where the white guy was trying to convince the Japanese girl to sleep with him. The guy was pulling out every sorry line in the book. Kill me. Or take me home to bed. Either or. Finally the clock got closer to 5 and we stumbled to the train. Moving from train to train since no rapids run that early, we finally reached the ryokan by 6:45 AM and daylight.
Tomorrow: seeing my boyfriend in 'Akumu Tantei', being a princess, and hitting the streets of Ginza. I'm out.
