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.

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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.