Updating!!

Considering it's the end of November now, I'm kind of not hopeful about catching up on October.  >.>  At least I got an overview of things up....anyways! 

The new exciting thing right now is that I just got back from a week in Tokyo!  Which was fall break.  We went to lots of places and did lots of things.  We stayed in a (hotel? hostel? not really sure what the term would be, it calls itself a 'guest house') in Shinagawa, which is a relatively quiet little area but really easily accessible to the city at large via the Yamanote line (a Japan Rail line that runs in a loop around much of downtown Tokyo).  From there, we visited the Ueno zoo, Harajuku, Shinjuku, Shibuya, Akihabara, Ikebukuro, and Asakusa.

We took the night bus to and from Tokyo, so we left at 11:30 PM last Tuesday and arrived at something like 7:30 AM on Wednesday.  Unfortunately, since it was a holiday (Labor Day in Japan), this was too early for anything to be open.  As in, not even cafes or ATMs.  >.>  So, we waited around for a little while, then had breakfast in the Japanese equivalent to Starbucks.  Then we went to Akihabara, which is kind of nerd central.  I actually don't like Akiba (as it seems to be commonly shortened to) much.  I think it has to do with the fact that pretty much no woman seems to go there willingly--I don't think I ever saw more than one girl who wasn't either clearly going to/from work (Akiba has lots of themed cafes, with very recognizable uniforms), or being literally dragged around by a guy (presumably a boyfriend?), and considering I was in Tokyo with a bunch of self-identified nerds, I had a fair bit of time to observe.  With such a big gender disparity, it probably makes sense that a lot of the merchandise was rather...obviously male-targeted.  (As in, LOOK, BOOBIES.  LOOK, MORE BOOBIES.)  There ended up not being much of interest for me there, and a lot that I'd rather avoid, so I doubt I'll be going back anytime soon.

Akiba does have a gundam cafe, though, which is pretty cool to go see at least once.  We ate dinner there one day.  They served fondue and the inside looks like a futuristic space port.  The food is surprisingly reasonable for a themed cafe; we figured out why when we realized a simple non-alcoholic drink could cost as much as 800 yen.  >.>  Needless to say, we stuck to water. 

Back to talking about things chronologically.  On the afternoon of the first day, we went to Ueno Zoo.  We saw pandas!  Real, live, moving pandas!  They are cute balls of fluff.  They were sleepy, and the one just kind of got up from his flop, lumbered over to a new platform, and just flopped again, no arranging or anything, just a flop (very much like a very sleepy Sherman).  We also saw some REALLY giant birds--some kind of vulture, and I think their wingspan was as long as I am tall, at the minimum.  Apparently they're capable of carrying off humans (at least, small humans, up to somewhere around the size of the average 10 year old).  They were very very cool, though I was kind of glad I wasn't seeing them in the wild.  Also there were toucans, and a baby seal, and lots of cute night animals of which I don't remember names because they were in Japanese and I couldn't actually read most of the kanji, but one looked like a housecat and I wanted to take it home with me. 

Then we went to the hotel and ate conbini (convenience store--they sell decent cheap meals here) food for dinner and flopped and died because most of us didn't actually sleep so well on bus.

The next day we went to Harajuku!  Harajuku is a famous fashion district (though since it was a weekday and not a holiday, there weren't all that many people there).  We shopped, and looked at things we weren't actually going to buy but wanted to see (like Lolita dresses), and ate lunch at a place called Sweets Paradise where you pay about 1500 yen and get to eat all you want for a little over an hour.  They have drinks and ice cream and something like 30 different kinds of cakes and other desserts and also real food like curry and salad (guess what I didn't eat, out of this list).  It was wonderful, though Japanese sweets really are sweet in that pure-sugar kind of way that does limit how much you can eat in one sitting.  I tried really hard, but I couldn't manage trying ALL the cakes and things, not within the time limit.  But there is one here in Kyoto, too, apparently--I know what I'm planning for my birthday!!! 

Also in Harajuku I got a stuffed panda (it is the most huggable thing) and a capelet (warm things which are in fashion here right now and are amazingly not fitted so I can actually wear them!) which is red wool felt and has a fur-lined hood (no idea if it's real fur or not but for the price I would guess not) and is warm and essentially a fashionable blanket, which makes me very happy.  My friend says it makes me look like I should be wandering around Paris in the 1800s.  This amuses me. 

Then we went to...ah....Shinjuku, after Harajuku, where we wandered around for a while.  Guys: Shinjuku is huge.  As in, the streets are full of traffic, there are constantly-moving people EVERYWHERE, and the buildings are so tall they look like they're about to fall on you.  There was one where I turned the corner and saw this thing and my initial thought was 'This is a blimp and it is about to crash on my head oh shoot' and then I realized it was actually a humongous building with a kind of oval-ish shape to it.  Anyways, we wandered around for a while and then found a collection of narrow, walkable, dingy-looking streets with lots of little food places tucked in there, full of drunk salarymen and other sketchy-looking people, which I'm pretty sure was less sketchy than it looked.  We had delicious, cheap, homemade ramen.  It was the best.  Then we did some karaoke, and called it a night.

The next day, we went to Ikebukuro.  We had brunch (lunch?) at a little chinese restaurant (Japanese Chinese food is nothing like American Chinese food, btw), where we had things like ramen, gyoza, and mabodoufu.  It was delicious, actually, and since it was broad daylight maybe we can ignore the fact that it was in what appeared (from the names of the not-open-yet clubs around) to be a very sketchy area.  Then we wandered in a different direction and found a much less sketchy area full of big buildings, shopping-ish-looking stuff, and colorful signs.  Near there was a little quiet nerd area, which I found much more to my liking.  We wandered back to Akiba in the evening (this is when we ate at the Gundam cafe) and it was a nice relaxing day of wandering and exploring and eating tasty things. 

We slept in on Saturday morning, then spent the morning/day at Asakusa.  Asakusa is basically the remnants of historical downtown Tokyo, from what I can tell--it has a gate with a gigantic paper lantern in it, and a willow tree (the old symbol for the 'floating world', which makes me suspect that this was an entertainment district a couple centuries back), and then a street full of shopping for everything from kimono to deep fried manju, and then more streets of shops (once again, everything from used kimono to snack foods to jeans embroidered with dragons), and a park area with a temple and a bunch of little shrines and some very pretty gardens.  We ate chocolate covered bananas and took lots of pictures and saw a bunch of brides wandering around.  It was pretty cool. 

Then, at late afternoon, we split ways.  I'm not sure about the others, but I headed to Shibuya to meet up with some of my coworkers from Mori no Ike, and also some other people who had worked at MnI the first half of the summer and were also in Tokyo at the moment.  I got there a little early and had some time to explore--Shibuya has a lot of shopping, with everything from cheap bookstores to Forever 21.  (On that note, I strongly prefer the Japanese Forever 21 to the American version.  It's much classier.  You know, except for the whole 'we don't do sizes larger than American small' thing, because it's Japan.  I did get a cheap belt because I needed one.)  Then I met up with my coworkers at 6, at this dog statue outside the station.  This was a terrible idea on Makoto's part--that statue is apparently the meetup point for every single person going to Shibuya with friends, which meant that it was surrounded by a giant mob of people!  Luckily I am tall, and I saw someone wearing a MnI sweatshirt, and was like HEY are you here to meet and he was like YES let's be tall gaijin together and let other people find us and we did and it worked.  It was one of the rare cases where being a head taller than most people was actually extremely helpful.  Once we found people, we went and got yakiniku (we call it Korean Barbecue in the US, not sure why), which means we got lots of meat and grilled the little thin slices ourselves and then ate them fresh and hot off the grill.  It's not cheap (it came out to something like 3000 yen a person), but for a special occasion it's not impossibly expensive either, and it was very tasty.  I was a little surprised when I learned that one of the things I'd been eating was beef tongue, but it was tasty so I figured I'd keep eating it anyways (this is why I tend to ask what things are made of AFTER trying them, unless they look so awful that I need reassurance as to their really being edible).  And then we did karaoke and screamed camp songs until our voices gave out. 

Finally, we got to Sunday, the last day of our visit.  We checked out of the hotel in the morning, since we'd be taking the bus back that night, and explored Shinagawa (the area around the hotel) for a while.  Then we went and did karaoke again.  We tried to get Koyami (who is very shy) to sing, and mostly succeeded by requesting the Japanese themes for Dragonball, which are ridiculous and which not a single one of us knew how to sing, so it just turned into a bunch of crazy yelling out lines because they were so ridiculous.  Finally, we spent another couple hours exploring Shinjuku.  We wandered around for a long time until we finally ended up in some area (this was another train station down the line at this point) full of kpop idol stores and korean restaurants.  It was starting to get dark, and we noticed that girls' clothes were getting smaller and smaller and the makeup more and more intense, past the point of fashion and far into the realm of 'You're a prostitute, aren't you?'.  So we turned around and headed back to the Shinjuku area.  (Note to self: Do not wander around Shinjuku alone, there are too many potentially sketchy areas and you have zero sense of direction.)  We had dinner at some point, and then went and collected our bags (we'd checked them at the hotel to avoid dragging them everywhere) and went and caught our bus. 

In overview, basically, Tokyo is an incredibly huge place with all the everything there.  Some areas are pretty awesome--I liked Harajuku and Asakusa a lot.  Others are less so--Akiba is not my favorite.  (I probably should like Shinjuku less considering the number of relatively sketchy areas we stumbled upon, but my favorite manga is set in a sketchy part of Shinjuku, so....)  The trip was hectic and incredibly busy and a lot of fun, and it was good to be exposed to a part of Japan so different from Kyoto and the Kansai region.  I probably won't go again this year, because there are lots of other places to go in Japan and I honestly think I like Kyoto better anyways (Tokyo is so big, it's really kind of too much for me to want to spend a lot of time there, and I like the atmosphere of Kyoto).  But I'm really glad I went.