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timerippleAt the risk of sounding like T-Rex from Dinosaur Comics: Dudes! I WAS IN JAPAN. I went to see Japan and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
snowqueenofhoth, who was the most amazing hostess ever and let me crash on her floor and arranged everything and is basically the Most Awesome Person Ever, is what I'm saying. (Except for the part where she got me addicted to Wieder-in energy jelly, but that might have been a teeeeeeensy bit my fault as well.) I am eternally glad I had that Star Wars cereal box back in first year. Thank you for everything!~ ♥
I was unduly excited to be flying JAL because of a certain drama, but let's not linger on my extreme dorkery, shall we? Even lining up to show my passport pre-ticket-collecting, the JAL dude bowed. He bowed. People actually bow.
I was totally delighted to have samurai movies on the plane, and I watched Tajomaru twice in between excerpts from Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows. It’s kind of a dumb, predictable movie full of omg trrrrragedy, but I’ll gladly watch Oguri Shun run around in a samurai costume any number of times. He’s betrayed by his brother and trusted retainer and fiancee, blah blah, kills a bandit and takes his identity, and a bunch of bandits make him their leader. After a while of Robin Hooding it, they dance around a campfire drunkenly rapping about how awesome being a bandit is, at which point I put my head down on my knees and cried laughing.
At last I stumbled out into the station and promptly got lost, because it is insane and complicated. I used a Japanese-style toilet with no fanfare and finally managed to blunder out to the street and find a taxi. Dude had no GPS and practically no English, but I whipped out my card withsnowqueenofhoth’s address carefully lettered in Japanese and he managed to find the place in under fifteen minutes. Good thing it was the right place, because the dude peeled on out of there the second I was out of his car. Rachel buzzed me up and I collapsed. I was just awake enough to agree to get up at some insane hour to meet people in the morning. Rachel showed me all the buttons, and I hoped desperately I would remember what they all did. Seriously, everything is buttons. Having recently read The Elegance of the Hedgehog I was tempted to try to make the toilet play music, but luckily exhaustion and good sense prevailed. I went to bed.
Unfortunately we really did have to get up at some insane hour and navigate the trains, but it was much better whenmousapelli and musikologie showed up. We went stumbling off through the dark to what Rachel called the Aquarium of Death, aka the Tsukiji fish market. All things considered it was probably for the best that cadragongirl wasn’t there after all, though we missed her terribly. There were a lot of tentacles. I trailed the others and tried not to get run over by transports and got distracted by the most enormous fish I have ever seen in my life. And more tentacles.
Then breakfast at a sushi place. I ate tamagoyaki for the first time (it was delicious), and stuck to that when my radish...thing turned out to be slimy. I enjoyed watching everybody else’s breakfast and speculating on what the little orange bits were.
After breakfast, we went back to Rachel’s place and had an epic group nap. I got to use her precious Mousi-made Kis-My-Ft2 blanket. When we woke up several hours later, we ate goldfish and totally failed to get up and played Intro Don instead. The others were obviously not quite awake yet, because for a while there I was winning. By a lot. (This is because Petra’s shuffle has an Arashi bias, and I’ve been listening to Arashi a lot lately. Don’t judge me; you try marathon copy/pasting with and without happy bouncy Arashi in your ear and see which way makes it go faster.)
At last we dragged ourselves away and went to the music store, then did karaoke for a few hours until the others absolutely had to leave. I learned a few more hiragana, everybody else totally failed to butcher things, and while Yamapi’s version of his own song “Run From You” is pretty bad, Mousi’s version is AMAZING.
Rosehip soda’s not bad, either.
Bubble tea. Dinner at an exciting and exotically Japanese... Denny’s. Shut up, French toast is totally a classy dinner. Then a sad farewell by the vending machine cluster, and back to HQ. I don’t even remember what we did the rest of the evening. Probably watched stuff.
I need to write this faster or it’ll never get done. It’s hard, finding a balance between “this is what I had for breakfast” and “this is what I had for breakfast, which you need to know about because it was Japanese and AWESOME.” Tell me how I’m doing.
The next morning--the 30th I guess-- we got combini-food breakfast and took the train to Ikebukuro and the Sunshine Aquarium. Which is in a shopping mall. On the roof.
Of course it is. Oh Japan.
I got my picture taken with a giant poster for the Nodame Cantabile movie, and then we peered at interestingly-displayed fish and saw an outdoor seal show and totally enthralled some girl who called us “Eigo-san” and took pictures of penguins and pelicans and miniature horses and capybara and I don’t know what.
Why there were capybara and miniature horses at an aquarium I do not know.
We soon went back inside to torment the cuttlefish, anyway. Rachel wanted one for a pet and I threatened to call the Society for the Protection of Domesticated Cuttlefish, only then I got distracted by the cute little sharks and we went and got lunch at an Italian place. I got a grammar lesson and went around chanting “Oishi, oishkatta, oishkunai, oishkunakatta” for the rest of the day, complete with gestures.
We prowled the streets of Ikebukuro for a while in search of doujinshi. I recited my grammar lesson. Innocent passersby no doubt thought, "Oh, a crazy white girl," which is perfectly normal.
And then it was time to go to the KinKi Kids concert at Tokyo Dome! But first we walked around Suidobashi and went on the Thunder Dolphin roller coaster at sunset and took a bunch of pictures and it was fantastic. The concert itself was fun, but very tame--picture, if you can, an entire baseball stadium full of people applauding politely. It took me a while to get the hang of it, but I eventually managed to wave my borrowed penlight correctly most of the time. Afterwards we strolled around and looked at the lights display and cracked up at the terrible American music being broadcast. I took a picture of a steampunky blueprint thing on some wall, I don’t know. It was great.
The 31st, Rachel painted my nails a terrifyingly awesome shade of turquoise and gave me stern instructions not to touch anything. Having thus made me into a captive audience, she made me watch the Playzone DVD and quizzed me on Hey! Say! Jump members. When my nails were deemed dry enough, we set out for the park, but ended up at Meiji Shrine completely by accident. The shrine is prettyyyyyyy, and it’s not just a temple, it’s an entire park itself. We walked to Harajuku, which harbors upscale shops for guys and cheap shops for girls and more idol shops than I ever wanted to see in my life. More doujinshi shopping at Mandarake, and I wound up with a Ryo uchiwa from 2006 that I still don’t know how to explain to my mother.
What? It cost like 300 yen. He can help my Creepy Edward Cullen poster deter burglars or something, I don’t know.
I put 200 yen in one of those random keychain machines and got Massu because we couldn’t find a Toma-themed one. Yay Massu?
Wandered through Shibuya, past the Aoyama theatre, got sweet life-giving chai at an exciting, exotically Japanese Starbucks. Home for a nap that lasted much longer than it was supposed to-- we missed Countdown, but were mostly okay with that because we were up in time to head back out to Rock Nakamatachi, which was AWESOME and deafening and at 2:30 am. We had the most amazing front-row balcony seats. It was Question? and FiVe, and Uchi randomly got added at the last minute, about which I don’t really care, but can I just say, “HI HI HIROCKY” is a truly atrocious song, seriously. The rest of the music was pretty damn good, though. And I got my hearing back eventually.
My favorite part was, of course, the rock violin by poor, exhausted Goto. HURRAY FOR SKINNY BOYS IN JEANS AND T-SHIRTS ROCKING OUT TO ROCK VIOLIN.There was this thing he’d do with his bow on the upbeat that was really cool. He kept trying to lie down and sleep on stage and people kept wanting encores and finally they had to drag him back on, and then he bounced around like an eight-year-old and fled across the stage and finally the bands were like, “No, really, we have no more songs, GO HOME ALREADY, YOU FREAKS.”
(I want an electric violin. I’d totally practice, honest! I’d also probably run around yelling “I’M EILEEN IVERS, SUCKERS!” but I’d grow out of it. Eventually.)
We went home and crashed.
To Be Continued.
snowqueenofhoth, who was the most amazing hostess ever and let me crash on her floor and arranged everything and is basically the Most Awesome Person Ever, is what I'm saying. (Except for the part where she got me addicted to Wieder-in energy jelly, but that might have been a teeeeeeensy bit my fault as well.) I am eternally glad I had that Star Wars cereal box back in first year. Thank you for everything!~ ♥I was unduly excited to be flying JAL because of a certain drama, but let's not linger on my extreme dorkery, shall we? Even lining up to show my passport pre-ticket-collecting, the JAL dude bowed. He bowed. People actually bow.
I was totally delighted to have samurai movies on the plane, and I watched Tajomaru twice in between excerpts from Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows. It’s kind of a dumb, predictable movie full of omg trrrrragedy, but I’ll gladly watch Oguri Shun run around in a samurai costume any number of times. He’s betrayed by his brother and trusted retainer and fiancee, blah blah, kills a bandit and takes his identity, and a bunch of bandits make him their leader. After a while of Robin Hooding it, they dance around a campfire drunkenly rapping about how awesome being a bandit is, at which point I put my head down on my knees and cried laughing.
At last I stumbled out into the station and promptly got lost, because it is insane and complicated. I used a Japanese-style toilet with no fanfare and finally managed to blunder out to the street and find a taxi. Dude had no GPS and practically no English, but I whipped out my card with
snowqueenofhoth’s address carefully lettered in Japanese and he managed to find the place in under fifteen minutes. Good thing it was the right place, because the dude peeled on out of there the second I was out of his car. Rachel buzzed me up and I collapsed. I was just awake enough to agree to get up at some insane hour to meet people in the morning. Rachel showed me all the buttons, and I hoped desperately I would remember what they all did. Seriously, everything is buttons. Having recently read The Elegance of the Hedgehog I was tempted to try to make the toilet play music, but luckily exhaustion and good sense prevailed. I went to bed. Unfortunately we really did have to get up at some insane hour and navigate the trains, but it was much better when
mousapelli and musikologie showed up. We went stumbling off through the dark to what Rachel called the Aquarium of Death, aka the Tsukiji fish market. All things considered it was probably for the best that cadragongirl wasn’t there after all, though we missed her terribly. There were a lot of tentacles. I trailed the others and tried not to get run over by transports and got distracted by the most enormous fish I have ever seen in my life. And more tentacles. Then breakfast at a sushi place. I ate tamagoyaki for the first time (it was delicious), and stuck to that when my radish...thing turned out to be slimy. I enjoyed watching everybody else’s breakfast and speculating on what the little orange bits were.
After breakfast, we went back to Rachel’s place and had an epic group nap. I got to use her precious Mousi-made Kis-My-Ft2 blanket. When we woke up several hours later, we ate goldfish and totally failed to get up and played Intro Don instead. The others were obviously not quite awake yet, because for a while there I was winning. By a lot. (This is because Petra’s shuffle has an Arashi bias, and I’ve been listening to Arashi a lot lately. Don’t judge me; you try marathon copy/pasting with and without happy bouncy Arashi in your ear and see which way makes it go faster.)
At last we dragged ourselves away and went to the music store, then did karaoke for a few hours until the others absolutely had to leave. I learned a few more hiragana, everybody else totally failed to butcher things, and while Yamapi’s version of his own song “Run From You” is pretty bad, Mousi’s version is AMAZING.
Rosehip soda’s not bad, either.
Bubble tea. Dinner at an exciting and exotically Japanese... Denny’s. Shut up, French toast is totally a classy dinner. Then a sad farewell by the vending machine cluster, and back to HQ. I don’t even remember what we did the rest of the evening. Probably watched stuff.
I need to write this faster or it’ll never get done. It’s hard, finding a balance between “this is what I had for breakfast” and “this is what I had for breakfast, which you need to know about because it was Japanese and AWESOME.” Tell me how I’m doing.
The next morning--the 30th I guess-- we got combini-food breakfast and took the train to Ikebukuro and the Sunshine Aquarium. Which is in a shopping mall. On the roof.
Of course it is. Oh Japan.
I got my picture taken with a giant poster for the Nodame Cantabile movie, and then we peered at interestingly-displayed fish and saw an outdoor seal show and totally enthralled some girl who called us “Eigo-san” and took pictures of penguins and pelicans and miniature horses and capybara and I don’t know what.
Why there were capybara and miniature horses at an aquarium I do not know.
We soon went back inside to torment the cuttlefish, anyway. Rachel wanted one for a pet and I threatened to call the Society for the Protection of Domesticated Cuttlefish, only then I got distracted by the cute little sharks and we went and got lunch at an Italian place. I got a grammar lesson and went around chanting “Oishi, oishkatta, oishkunai, oishkunakatta” for the rest of the day, complete with gestures.
We prowled the streets of Ikebukuro for a while in search of doujinshi. I recited my grammar lesson. Innocent passersby no doubt thought, "Oh, a crazy white girl," which is perfectly normal.
And then it was time to go to the KinKi Kids concert at Tokyo Dome! But first we walked around Suidobashi and went on the Thunder Dolphin roller coaster at sunset and took a bunch of pictures and it was fantastic. The concert itself was fun, but very tame--picture, if you can, an entire baseball stadium full of people applauding politely. It took me a while to get the hang of it, but I eventually managed to wave my borrowed penlight correctly most of the time. Afterwards we strolled around and looked at the lights display and cracked up at the terrible American music being broadcast. I took a picture of a steampunky blueprint thing on some wall, I don’t know. It was great.
The 31st, Rachel painted my nails a terrifyingly awesome shade of turquoise and gave me stern instructions not to touch anything. Having thus made me into a captive audience, she made me watch the Playzone DVD and quizzed me on Hey! Say! Jump members. When my nails were deemed dry enough, we set out for the park, but ended up at Meiji Shrine completely by accident. The shrine is prettyyyyyyy, and it’s not just a temple, it’s an entire park itself. We walked to Harajuku, which harbors upscale shops for guys and cheap shops for girls and more idol shops than I ever wanted to see in my life. More doujinshi shopping at Mandarake, and I wound up with a Ryo uchiwa from 2006 that I still don’t know how to explain to my mother.
What? It cost like 300 yen. He can help my Creepy Edward Cullen poster deter burglars or something, I don’t know.
I put 200 yen in one of those random keychain machines and got Massu because we couldn’t find a Toma-themed one. Yay Massu?
Wandered through Shibuya, past the Aoyama theatre, got sweet life-giving chai at an exciting, exotically Japanese Starbucks. Home for a nap that lasted much longer than it was supposed to-- we missed Countdown, but were mostly okay with that because we were up in time to head back out to Rock Nakamatachi, which was AWESOME and deafening and at 2:30 am. We had the most amazing front-row balcony seats. It was Question? and FiVe, and Uchi randomly got added at the last minute, about which I don’t really care, but can I just say, “HI HI HIROCKY” is a truly atrocious song, seriously. The rest of the music was pretty damn good, though. And I got my hearing back eventually.
My favorite part was, of course, the rock violin by poor, exhausted Goto. HURRAY FOR SKINNY BOYS IN JEANS AND T-SHIRTS ROCKING OUT TO ROCK VIOLIN.There was this thing he’d do with his bow on the upbeat that was really cool. He kept trying to lie down and sleep on stage and people kept wanting encores and finally they had to drag him back on, and then he bounced around like an eight-year-old and fled across the stage and finally the bands were like, “No, really, we have no more songs, GO HOME ALREADY, YOU FREAKS.”
(I want an electric violin. I’d totally practice, honest! I’d also probably run around yelling “I’M EILEEN IVERS, SUCKERS!” but I’d grow out of it. Eventually.)
We went home and crashed.
To Be Continued.
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no subject
Date: 2010-01-13 09:59 pm (UTC)awwwwwww ♥
Okay, but so i knew this was going to happen, but I have such Japan conbini food withdrawal that it isn't even funny. I WANT AN ONIGIRI AND A COFFEE MILK. everytime i go there and come back to the conbini-less USA it gets worse. Yesterday i was digging around jlist.com to discover that they have the milk tea kitkats but not the coffee milk kitkats, and literally i had to close the browser tab because i was about to tear up.
Also i am out of mizushima hiro mini chocolates. WOEZ.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-14 06:02 am (UTC)NOOOOOO the Mizushima Hiro chocolates cannot run ou--OH HEY I still have like 14 episodes of Kamen Rider Kabuto to watch! I am now slightly less depressed!
...still want my energy jelly, dammit. *commiserates*
no subject
Date: 2010-01-14 10:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-14 07:20 pm (UTC)Damn it, now I want those.
no subject
Date: 2010-03-20 01:15 pm (UTC)I can send you some? XD Woah this is late. It's already March. =O
no subject
Date: 2010-03-20 03:02 pm (UTC)Not like I could really stop you, anyway. ;D
no subject
Date: 2010-01-18 05:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-18 06:23 am (UTC)Thank goodness we have a Wegmans at least, so that I can get short grain rice and instant udon.
no subject
Date: 2010-03-20 03:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-14 10:20 am (UTC)I'm glad you had a good time, despite the illness. ^-^
I'm finally recovered to the point of feeling almost human again, as well. ;)
no subject
Date: 2010-01-14 07:17 pm (UTC)Almost human is about as good as it gets sometimes. ;) I'm glad you're feeling better!
no subject
Date: 2010-01-15 03:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-14 03:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-14 07:19 pm (UTC)