Mado O Akete Samuku Naru

baboobaboobaboobabooo... my brains is become pudd'n. i have two chapters of words to memorize, some sentence structures to get down, and takusan kanji oboiru tsumori desu, yo. (i'm going to memorize a lot of kanji). it's kind of piling up on me. i'm doing alright, though, dammit. maybe a few too many extended afternoon naps, but otherwise decent.

nothing much of major consequence happened during the week. had dinner with m'ladies out at the damned mall and got a haircut after some frantic gesturing about which barberin' tools to apply to which parts of my head. saturday night, took the bus out to the local neighborhood city hall or council building or some such for their fuyu matsuri, or winter festival. fireworks were going off as we pulled up, and they had their large parking lot filled with a bunch of huge snow sculptures and food booths. there was an enormous castle with a wall around it that said "cinderella" in carved out letters, a snoopy sculpture, an anpan man, a bunch of mini-kamakuras and a huge slide. i walked around buying a few whatnots to eat, and then some kids came up to me and said they recognized me as santa from television. then they started singing a song that had something to do with butts and threw snowballs at me while chasing me toward the supermarket across the street. i stayed over there and bought a few things, ran into some students who came out for the doings, walked down to the bus stop with them and had a snowball fight while waiting for the bus. it was a pretty fun little festival for a dinky little place like wada.

sunday, sunday... got up pretty early to ride a series of busses, with two of the taiwanese girls and a brittish feller, out to a place on the sea called the selion tower. selion is a big tall glass rectangle with a museum, restaurant, and indoor observation deck at the top. we could see the whole city from up there, the mountains, the harbor at the base of the tower where a giant ship was being loaded or unloaded with massive cranes, a railyard, the whole thing covered with snow. we made a few loops up there, then went down to a flea market to meet up with aki, the lady from the akita christmas thing, who was selling some of her stuff with the friend i met at the itallian place. among the stuff she was selling were homemade candles and jewelry, and an unopened box of plastic farm animals with names like "king cock", which she bought for no apparent reason sometime in the recent past. i sat around talking with her for a while about more english and japanese language difficulties, and she dug around in the stuff the people next to her were selling, trying on an enormous pair of orange glasses. we had to catch a bus back to the station, so i bought a few of the candles, made some half-plans, and left. i'd like to go back in the spring, maybe with this one dude, name's carls quinn? it was too cold to really walk along the harbor, and there was an empty rock garden inside the wide base of the tower that looked like it was only in use during warmer weather.

came back and fell asleep. while i was sleeping, i guess i missed a chance to go wandering in the woods with a few peoples and cook norwegian bread on a campfire. i was sitting in the cafeteria eating instant noodles and trying to wake the hell up when they all came back covered in snow and smelling like smoke. i don't want to miss stuff like that, so no more sleeping in the middle of the damn day, i'll just drink coffee or avoid sitting down or something.

time to go learn more stuff now. i volunteered for something on thursday, but i'm not exactly sure what.

Shashin-juicy-jutsu

more from the trip: a kabuki/noh/kyogen stage on the mountainside, and several scenes from the fire festival in hiraizumi

Shashinjutsu Than a Mug

some stuff: the party, making the kamakura, the cliff temple, and a couple of the other temples we saw. now some more

A Wild Variety of Parsley

sooooo... first week and a half of winter semester classes over. they're drilling me into the ground this time, the japanese and the thick packets of assigned reading from the traditional japanese performing arts class. sometimes the japanese class is moving too fast to be of much value, but i'm picking up a lot, too.

what the hell's been going on? sorting through plans to try to fit this trip to taiwan in between folks visiting and school obligations. spent a while on friday afternoon building an enormous kamakura, or snow house, with a few people, carving out a little door, and then crawling inside with everyone who made it. about seven people fit in there. then there was a fine little party last friday night at a norwegian girl's room. about 15 people squooshed into a dinky dorm around a table stacked with dried squid, chips, chu-hi and sour norwegian candy. pretty dang fun, but hard on the ankles, sitting on that hardwood floor.

the next day, went out with the performing arts teacher and one other dude from america to the local entertainment monolith to sit in some gundam battle pod thingies and shoot at other robots controlled by folks playing at the same time around japan. that was some ok stuff. little far to go for a round or two of shoot 'em ups, though.

sunday was a damn jewel. got up around 8 to head out on a combined field trip with this semester's tohoku culture class and some people from the performing arts class. we drove two hours east into the next prefecture, iwate. first, we went to a temple that is built into the side of a cliff, and is surrounded by some statues, smaller shrines, and a buddha face carved into the cliff next to it. the area has had some sort of temple on the grounds for the last 1,200 years, and i think the carving in the cliff was about five or six hundred years old. we walked around there for a while, over small wooden bridges and through a few gardens, then headed off to a town called hiraizumi, which used to be some sort of old capital for the tohoku region before it was even a part of japan. there was a mountain path leading through a bunch of temples, shrines, grave sites, statues, and a museum holding nine hundred year old artifacts from the area like the remnants of swords, clothing, and furniture, and also a fully intact gold walled temple and three giant wooden buddha carvings from the heian era (around 1100). the paths leading from temple to temple were lined with massive bamboo stalks and old twisted trees.

next, we walked past the site of an old temple, where the garden still remains next to the markers for the entrance hall, to a restaurant where we all had the same dinner of sashimi, soba, and some locally famous beef on rice, a ton of damn food. i ate the sashimi particularly slow so it wouldn't dissapear too fast.

we walked from there back to the old temple and garden grounds where people were gathering for the local fire festival, standing around two big iron bowl-shaped cages blazing with sake fueled fires. people walked around pouring little cups of sake for everyone, and then they'd scoop some out of a bucket onto the fires. after a while, we heard some drums and flutes coming down the main road into the temple grounds, and the group ran ahead to get a good view of what was coming.

from the side of the path inside the grounds, we watched as about 20 or so men wrapped in nothing but a little white loincloth marched very slowly in two lines while propping a 10 foot long clump of burning sticks of some sort against their thighs. the whole group would chant and then take another big swinging step in the march, while behind them walked priests, and people who were playing drums and keeping the fires lit. when they got to the main temple area, they added the sticks to a big bonfire and then some of them charged inside the temple and did something i couldn't see. a few minutes later they came running out, i think chasing somebody, did something else i couldn't see while surrounded by spectators and camera crews, and eventually started tossing someone in the air. after they stopped tossing the guy around, they climbed up to the temple and threw bags of mochi out to the crowd. i cought one, but i poked myself in the damn pinkie and the mochi was tasteless because to catch it is just good luck, you're not actually supposed to eat it, which may have ruined the good luck, i dunno.

when that part of the festival was over, an audience settled into the temple, which had open walls to accomodate the large crowd, to watch the annual performance symbolizing a prayer for strong rice crops (i think), and incorporating some old myths about the goddess of the sun arguing with her brother the moon god (i think). the whole idea behind the fire festival is a commemoration of old rituals performed thousands of years ago to "re-ignite" the sun for spring. there were dancers in big straw hats representing the rice fields, and children in large hats representing the young sun and moon of the new year. we took off from there around 11pm, and didn't get back to school till after 1am, a 17 hour field trip.

this week i've just been trying to recover from that and keep up with what's going on in japanese class. next up is a trip on sunday with some of m'ladies to a glass tower out on the sea of japan to wander around, go up in the tower, and really basically just so's i can hobnob and carouse with aki, the lady what i met whilst dressed like santa, who is selling some of her stuff at a flea market because she's dirt poor.

Tokidoki Kodomo ga Watashi no Hige Daikirai

it's 4am. i've been up since 11pm because my sleeping schedule's gotten all twisted during the break. last night i wandered around the library plucking books off the shelves in the english language room in the back, a hot, mostly aluminum and iron cube with a 5 foot ceiling and stacks of unused furniture next to the shelves.

i managed to have a decent schedule for half the day on saturday, getting up for another egg brick, fish, rice, fermented bean breakfast and then heading off in a pair of taxis with six other students to a kindergarten in akita city. there, we met about 20 people from 12 countries and ranging in age from around 20 to mid 50's, mostly students from akita university in the city, and some foriegn languace instructors living and teaching in the region. i got bear hugged by a russian woman, because she thinks i look like the ideal russian man or somesuch. apparently, this was the 20th annual international meeting at this school. we introduced ourselves by country, played a few games and sang some songs with the 80 or so kids, then made mochi by helping the kids pound rice with a huge heavy wooden mallet while someone else kneaded the giant rice ball and added water. we ate the mochi, which had been rolled in bean paste or sugar, with the kids in little groups, and i tried my damndest to come up with conversation topics. we talked about my beard and how they'd rather not have one, favorite foods, and my watch. that's about as far as i got. otherwise, making faces seemed the most effective form of communication.

i thought i had my waking/sleeping schedule in order, but i came back from that stuff around 1pm, fell asleep almost immediately, and now i'm in this ass-backwards quandry. not so terrible, i guess, being the only person wandering around in the entire school, i feel like the whole place is mine.

got my classes for winter - about 11 hours of japanese a week, and one other class called "traditional japanese performing arts". guess there are a few big field trips planned for this one, so should be a damn delight. there are also some rumblings about a trip to taiwan with m'ladies on the other end of the winter term, but let's not jinx anything with too much blather.

Hana Mizu

stellar and grand, this evening. a little bit of snow, a liberal ammount of illumination bouncing at us from the moon, and i spent some quality time with a girl i met at the hot hot christmas thing when i was prancing around in my ill fitting santa suit, and a friend of hers. she doesn't know a whole lot of english, and i don't know a whole lot of japanese, so we've been sending half cryptic phone messages to eachother for about a week trying to meet up somewhere. she told me about this place she wanted to meet, and i had to go print out a map of the city and search for it. found it, highlighted it, took the train out tonight, and it was a simple 15 minute walk from the station. turns out the meeting spot was a long abandoned movie theater off in a corner of the business district. spotted her rolling past on her bike, and we walked down the street where her friend was waiting for us. the friend knew about a tiny old itallian restaurant down a side street, so we wedged ourselves through the door and up some narrow stone steps to a table overlooking the bar. the owner, who was sitting at the bar talking with folks, said "bona sera" when we walked in. our table was like an old foot locker or something, and we sat on fluffy scruffy couches. we ordered a friggin fantastic pizza and a couple mugs of beer each. most of the conversation centered around how utterly frustrating learning a new language can be, and they both had pocket notebooks that we were writing english and japanese phrases in. also pictures of raccoons, foxes and noses. found out the japanese term for runny nose just translates as 'nose water', which i think i found a hell of a lot funnier than they did. time was eaten up, and i had to go run for the last train. great to be able to establish a connection to people outside of the isolated, maniacal little island this school can become, and i hope i have a lot more chances to hang out with them.

Getsuyoubi

1-1-08 pt 2

monday... last full day in tokyo - what happened? basically stayed around the hostel neighborhood until pretty late, and decided on the shibuya area for our new year's countdown. we got out at shibuya station, and the crossing was swarming with people. people in costumes, tons of gaijin, police putting up barriers and driving big armored vans, and a group in the square in front of the station holding "free hugs" signs. one of the police officers we talked to claimed there was no countdown in the area, but they were putting up those barricades and gearing up for something.

we stood around at the crossing waiting to see what might happen, talking to a few people and gawping at the enormous crowd. then a big black bus with tv screens instead of windows rolled through with numbers scrolling across it - 23, 22, 21, then disappeared around the corner. the crowd took up the count, and at zero, charged into the street, high fiving, hugging eachother, and screaming "akemashite omedeto!" (happy new year) and "daisuki! daisuki!" (a lot easier to say than "i really like you in a usually non-romantic way!"). i bearhugged a few folks, told all the japanese ladies i loved 'em, and whenever the light turned green, everyone would run into the street and do it again.

we did that four or five times until the crowd started to thin out, then got on a train for meiji shrine, got out and discovered where all the people went. everyone was crowded into the path and being herded along in groups by more police. we met a few guys in our group, one of whom was a japanese fellow doing graduate work at georgetown and home for winter break. the group wound around the path, washed our hands before the shrine, (part of the ritual, a purification symbol), walked up in front of the main gate, and since the offering box was too far away and there were so many people, a big tarp was laid out in an area in front of the gate and the people just throw money at it from wherever they are. it's good luck to throw 5 yen pieces, so i was in the middle of thousands of people hurling coins at the shrine as hard as they could, some of them tossing 20 or so at a time. then they would clap twice (to wake up the gods) and pray.

we milled around the square for a spell, then walked with the crowd to an open area at the entrance to the park where vendors were selling udon and soba bowls in a brightly lit circle. had a big hot bowl of soba, and that was basically it. got on our trains and went to bed around 3 am.

i got up the next day after the others had already left, packed up my stuff, bought all the appropriate tickets, and was taken home by the shinkansen. it feels so strange to be here now. everything is really quiet and somehow unfamiliar or shifted in some way. i don't know what the hell i'll do for the ten days until the semester starts, there's no good way to recover from something that bowls you over the way tokyo does. i'm a little helpless here after that.

Nichiyoubi

1-1-08 pt 1

i'm stuck in a corner of tokyo station for two hours while i wait for my shinkansen back to akita, so i might as well try to remember what has been happening for the last two days... i think it's tuesday, right? so - sunday... got going a little late, around one, for harajuku, meiji shrine, and yoyogi park, all in the same area. jumped off the train at harajuku station and circled a few intersections first on some old crosswalk bridges. harajuku has omotesando, a broad street lined with upscale stores, on one end, and meiji jingu, the largest shrine in tokyo (i think) on the other. in the middle are more crowded, narrow lanes, these ones geared toward teens, mostly teens who like the lolita or gothic lolita stuff.

we walked down the broad gravel lane in yoyogi park leading to meiji shrine, passing under huge wooden gates, through the outer wall of the shrine, and into a wide open square in front of the main shrine. saw some young guys who tend to the shrine running around beyond the public area getting ready for new year's eve. on new year's eve, millions (honestly, millions) of people line up along the path to the shrine to give an offering and pray for a good new year. at that time it was relatively empty. huge banners with rats eating raddishes on them were hanging from the outer walls of the shrine. (2008 is the year of the rat.) we put in our offering, 5 yen for good luck, and walked back to the cramped little street in harajuku to look for a gallery i have wanted to see for a long time.

i had a little hand made map with me, and we were trying to follow it, but the street names didn't match up, and some of them seemed to be reversed from the map. we went in a few circles and kept getting further out from the central part of harajuku, so we gave up on finding the gallery and just walked. we ended up walking all the way to roppongi, cutting across the southwestern corner of the city, past a huge cemetery into roppongi's skyscrapers.

took the train to an area near shinjuku to eat some indian food, but that place was closed, so we started walking again, into the kabuki-cho area of shinjuku. stopped at a few brittish pubs for a few beers, and met up for a while with a japanese girl some of the other folks met before i got to town. she had to leave early, so we wandered around kabuki-cho, and this time through, experienced something closer to the reputation of the place. bahamanmian dudes stood out in front of buildings that had hostess bars and strip clubs stacked five stories high, and asked us if we were interested in a list of activities, none of which included needlepoint or a round of go fish, and we were practically chased down with other offers.

we thought we saw a sign that said trains would be running all night, so we stayed out a while wandering around kabuki-cho, then headed back to the station, which was locked up tight. we circled the station looking for a door and were just about to go sleep in a mcdonalds when i decided to ask a taxi how much the fare to our hostal was. turns out it's not so bad, so we got in and saw what tokyo looks like from the freeway. got home, sleepybyes, so on and so forth...

Doyoubi

12-29-07

got up really, really friggin early, all four of us, to go out to the tsukiji fish market right after the fresh stuff gets hauled in. the fish market is about six or eight square blocks of vendors standing under ripped up awnings in floppy rubber boots, in those narrow japanese streets and yelling about whatever they've got lying out front in bins or buckets. we saw bright red octopus tentacles, crabs, squid, huge tuna in a frozen pile, and who knows what the hell else dredged up from the bottom of the sea. wove down most of the streets taking in the smells and sounds, and watching the guys who speed around on little carts and damn near knock everybody over. stopped at one of the many sushi shops in the market and sampled some stuff. the best i had was salmon roe wrapped with some salmon meat and a sprig of something green. good lord. i didn't weep, because i was in public and i have a lion's heart, but i almost lost it after that first piece of sushi.

after the market, we all took a relatively new monorail out to an area called odaiba, across a little corner of tokyo bay on a long suspension bridge called the rainbow bridge. odaiba had some great views of the bay, the buildings on the other side, and the bridge, but it was mostly just a touristy amusement and shopping area without the awesomeness that makes that stuff something to witness in the rest of tokyo. spent a long time there poking around in novelty shops and shambling about. wes went to meet some college friends from america, shannon and chris wanted to come back to the hostal, and i decided to go to ueno park on my own.

ueno park has a reputation of being kind of run down or maybe dangerous, because i think drug dealers hang out at one of the entrances, and there's a homeless camp on the outskirts by the station, but there are also some great shrines, temples, a few museums, a pond, a zoo, a 140 year old warrior cemetary, and a bunch of statues.

i wandered through there until it got dark, then i went to the other side of the station and found the craziest little scuzzy area of tokyo i've seen yet. it's two streets forking out from a triangular building in an area called ameyokocho. on one street, stalls and shops and pachinko parlors are shoved under some elevated train tracks and people stand out front yelling about whatever they're trying to sell; watches, handbags, squid, takoyaki, shoes, everything. there are hundreds of stalls, and they all have people yelling at once, and thousands of people are trying to squish down this street in every direction. at the end where the street forks off, there were about ten police officers with bullhorns, trying somehow to direct people, and one police officer standing 20 feet up in a booth on top of some scaffolding attempting to direct traffic or somesuch thing, it was amazing and crazy and also felt a little bleak after a good dose of that stuff.

parts of ueno were pretty grim, but i'd much rather see stuff like that than the newest abercrombie and fitch store out in the megalopolis, even if it is in damn tokyo. now i will pass the hell out. tomorrow - harajuko da yo! crazy teenagers, weird bands, hopefully we can find a gallery i'm looking for called the design festa house, and i think we will also see meiji shrine and yoyogi park in that area.

Kinyoubi

12-28-07

got up slowly and waited for wes so he could drop off his crap in the room. he came with oka and then we went out to eat breakfast. chris and i went to the bakery again, and oka and wes went somewhere else. i got ahold of the andersons, the family who's kids i taught at the montessori place, and chris and i met them in meguro, where they live now.

emi picked us up at the station with their 4 year old boy, kaina, who i used to search for bugs with, and drove us back to their apartment. kaina talked about ultraman the whole way, about how many kinds of ultraman there are, what they do, what their names are, and when we got to the apartment, he showed me his new christmas present, an ultraman video game action chop 'em up.

meguro's mostly residential, has a few parks and a lot of families. we talked for a while, and then walked to one of the local parks, which was having a little matsuri. there were a few small shrines in the park, a bunch of food stands, and matsuri games like fish scoop, a pachinko type bingo game, and a pellet gun game. kaina got an ultraman mask and we tried some deep fried mochi - damn delicious. after that park, we walked to another one with a playground where noe and kaina showed me all of their physical feats on the climbing equipment.

next, mikey and emi took us all out to a place that is apparently one of the best ramen joints in tokyo, somewhere past the site of the tokyo olympics. we all got big bowls of tonkatsu ramen with gyouza and a cup of banana ice cream. the ramen was really good, creamy almost, and they make the ice cream there in the shop.

on the way back to meguro station, kaina fell asleep in my lap with a sucker poking out of his mouth, and noe and i played a game where she said something in japanese and i would have to say it in english. it was really cool to see those kids using japanese with their parents, with me, and with the people at the restaurant. they're so lucky to grow up with two languages.

after all that stuff, we met up with serena in ikebukuro, where she was waiting for family to show up and to check into a hotel with them. there wasn't much to distinguish ikebukuro from the other major areas of tokyo, i guess it's known for its department stores or somesuch? sat in a cafe there and talked whilst sipping a frothy thing, serena's aunt was retrieved, and chris and i came back here to chitose-karasuyama.

sat in another cafe for a while, waited for shannon to show up, got rained on, poked around this cool little bustling outpost some more, and then returned to the room for the night. there are 4 people crammed in here now. we marvelled at the ridiculousness of our living arrangements; the weird heater, the massive draft, the water heater panel with no on button, the lack of a shower curtain or the ability to turn around in the bathroom, the strange landlady who's always sleeping, the bizzare lack of any other tennants, the toilet that sounds like it's blasting through the roof when you flush it, etc, etc... fell asleep around one am knowing we'd be getting up at 5 am to get to the fish market when all the zaniness is at its peak.

Mokuyoubi

12-27-07

long day again. made a dilligent effort to get up at 9 am with the alarm, rolled over and slept till quarter to ten, got up and fiddled with a panel on the wall which controls the hot water and is missing an "on" button, got it to work, showered in the ridiculously dinky bathroom, went out and bought breakfast from a local bakery. this place used to be a town separate from tokyo a few decades ago, and it still feels like it.

got on a train and worked out the connections to get to asakusa to meet three taiwanese girls from school and a friend of one of theirs from their school in taiwan. while chris and i waited for them to get into asakusa from their hotel, i wandered along the sumida rifer and finally saw the golden poo sculpture. it's a big, bulbous, lopsided tadpole thing on top of the asahi beer building.

met up with the taiwanese girls at kaminari-mon, which means "thunder gate", a massive torii which opend onto a long, narrow, garish touristy strip of souvenir shops and food stalls until it bonked into sensoji temple, a giant thing with a huge incense urn in front a five tiered pagoda next to it, and people tossing offerings into a big metal box. the whole area was crammed with folks - saw alot of gaijin and even ran into a couple of m'ladies and three korean guys from school bumming around together. ate at a kind of bland japanese/italian family restaurant place, then one of the girls had to catch the shinkansen to kyoto with her friend, and the other two went somewhere else, so chris and i went to shibuya for a while to wander around.

went to shibuya crossing, i think it's called, a five or six way intersection where, honest to goodness, about a thousand people swarm across the huge square and push past eachother to get across the street while two story tall video screens blare somethingorother about a j-pop idol's new single. walked down a few streets to look at the flashing lights and whatnot, but didn't go to far. should probably go back to se yoyogi park and meiji shrine in that general area.

went to shinjuku next, since it was on the way home, and came out of the enormous shinjuku station into the kabuki-cho area, a place i imagined was much scuzzier than it is because all the stories i've read that take place there involve prostitutes, yakuza, and murderers. it didn't seem so different from parts of shibuya, ginza, or a lot of the other areas of tokyo i've seen, maybe just a higher concentration of nightclubs and buskers out in front of them.

went to some other parts of shinjuku overlooking the train station, and then headed back to one of the entrances where several bands were setting up to take turns playing. one of them was called "the you know may" or something like that and played shredding funk stuff. the drummer had a toy kit. there was also a decent jazz band called "meine meinung". we started talking to a couple gaijin standing next to us who are living just north of tokyo and learning a little japanese before they start an english teaching program next year. one of them was from waseca, mn.

came back to the neighborhood, ate at a cheap chinese chain place down the street, and then i took a walk through the area alone. turns out we're on the outskirts of most of the stuff of interest in the area. the rest is just semi-suburban boulevards that kind of reminded me of st. louis park. i did happen to see a combination cafe/dog grooming operation, though, and a few interesting looking side streets i'll go down when i can see them better.

tomorrow, no clue what to do - back out to shibuya? ueno? we'll go to the fish market soon, really damned early. past my bedtime right now.

Suiyobi

peoples. i'm back from tokyo, sitting in my surreally quiet dorm wondering what the hell to do for the next two weeks. i gotta get out of here before i start talking to the stuff on the shelves or something. to fend off nuttiness for now, i will type up the daily stuff from tokyo, with little pictures for each day. so... yes. day one:

12-26-07

heading to tokyo on the shinkansen. places i'm passing now have a meaning and weight to them that wasn't there on the way up. seeing places i've visitied, or the hometowns of people from school and thinking of the things i've done there, or the people from the towns we're passing and how they've effected me, thinking of how hard this trip will be when i have to leave these people and places behind.

...................................

yosh! here in my tiny four bed hostal room with chris from england and aiu on the bunk above me. this room is about 8 ft by 8 ft, and it used to be someones apartment. his name is still stuck to the plate next to the door. this neighborhood is a cool cramped area with shops piled up on top of eachother along twisting, narrow streets. we're pretty far out from the central tokyo area, about twenty minutes from the nearest yamanote line stop, the main tokyo train hub.

today: got on the shinkansen around noon, got into tokyo station around four, quickly found my yamanote connection to shinjuku and puttered around shinjuku for a while trying to meet up with chris. eventually found him on one of the seventy hunnert platforms at shinjuku, got on a local line to chitose-karasuyama, and walked to the hostal to drop off my stuff. turned back and wound around the yamanote circle to meet up with a big group of folks from school for one of m'ladies birthdays. i got into town pretty late, and all the connecting trains took a lot of time, so everyone had eaten by the time we made it to the meeting spot. we all gathered in a mcdonalds nearby, all 14 of us, and i ate another mega tamago while they had some birthday cake. we made a bunch of plans to meet up at various places and times around the city with various configurations of people, and begged some of the employees to take pictures of us.

the groups split off, and i went with a couple of folks to the roppongi ward to see tokyo tower. it was all lit up and there were christmas displays at the base with people milling around and taking pictures. we got there too late to take the elevator to the top, so we went to a building in the roppongi hills area called tokyo city view and took the elevator fifty some-odd floors up to the observation deck. there was a 360 degree view of tokyo from up there. we could see every light on every building, every car, every billboard, the ferris wheel on the other side of tokyo bay, everything. it was just an unending blanket of lights.

it was pretty late by then, so we shoved our way onto a train, transfered to another train and ambled back here. tomorrow, look around this neighborhood, and then i have plans to meet up with one of the taiwanese girls in the asakusa area by tokyo bay. maybe i can finally see the golden poop sculpture i've been dreaming of since before i was born.