Rolling 20 Deep (Day 5)

What an early morning. And what a morning for the train to be late. The train is never late. When the train is late, that usually means one thing – there has been an “accident”. And by “accident”, I mean that someone has jumped in front of the train to commit suicide. I think it happens quite a bit, because trains were slow both in Tokyo and Kyoto when I was there…

I met Jean at the station at around 8:15 and we hopped the first Chuo train to Yotsuya. It was jammed because everyone was heading to work, and so hot like sauna. I still bless the person who opened a window. Well, before we’d even hit Shinjuku, the train had stopped several times, taking far longer than the 45 minutes we had allotted to take a 29 minute ride. Needless to say, we were late arriving at Yotsuya and Keren was anxiously waiting. We double-gunned it into Sophia University to attend a presentation dedicated to Japanese sexuality and relationships.





Since we were given somewhat inaccurate directions and slightly late, we marched into the first lecture hall we found and proceeded to be stared back out. No English there…poor Keren tried to ask many students who ignored her and eventually found our way to the basement where we peeked into every room until we found one that had someone speaking English! Success! So we tried to sneak in at the back and eventually found our way to the front of the room (how’d that happen?) But at least we couldn’t tell who was staring at us since they were behind us. The presentations were really good – everyone spoke English well and brought up some omoshiroi (interesting) opinions such as they thought that westerners were more tolerant of cheating partners (um, what? They have reality shows for disputing this!)

After Sophia, we headed to the New Otani Hotel to check out their uber-zen Japanese garden, which the hotel was built around.














Smoggies, smoggies…

We then decided to kill some time before our tattoo adventures later that evening and headed to Meiji Jingu (Meiji Shrine) and Yoyogi Koen (Yoyogi Park).


I thought this building (as seen the previous photo) was something cool…turns out it was just the DoCoMo building (cell phone company).


Venturing into the shrine…



Many torii gates later, we arrive at the hand washing station (left first, then right)






Sake barrels

After the shrine, we continued onto Yoyogi. This is a very nice park, but somewhat reminiscent of Assiniboine Park in Winnipeg…and bigger…with more squatters.





We made our way to Shinjuku where we were to getting tattooed…but first! Needed some sustenance in the form of Biz.


As we were walking, I just thought this building looked neat-o-gang.





It took two hours and was somewhat harder than my first tattoo outing. It turned out all scabby and peeling and a bit itchy, but now mostly healed.

We then double-gunned it to Shinjuku to meet the gang for dinner. We arraged to meet in front of Studio Alta (just like real people do!)

















This was a swanky italian place on the 8th floor of some building. It was a dinner with about 20 girls, and the food was really good. Free drinks too, of which I partook of a few. I had a Moscow Mule, a screwdriver, and Yogurt Sour. All very watered-down and tasty.

After that, we headed for purikura! We crammed about 10 girls into a booth and posed away.




Met lots of nice people and some bitchy people that night.

Tomorrow is climbing (riding up) a mountain, seeing a working monastery, and venturing into the bowels of Kichijoji (and seeing Jean taking about a cute guy in front said cute guy in English and then finding out he speaks English. Awkward!)