tokyo, tokyo

Tokyo, tokyo. I’ve only been here for a few days and it’s been pretty crazy. The first night I got here I caught the limited express keisei train to Ueno and checked into the New Koyo Hostel. Small, clean, and one of the cheapest around (¥2700)- but it turns out I wouldn’t even sleep there. So right after I checked in I headed out to Nakai, which is on the west-siiiiiiiiiiiiide of town to check out a room in a guesthouse. Luckily I managed not to get lost on the daunting public transportation system here (so there’s actually something like 8 different companies that have rails in Tokyo, which makes pricing super complicated and there’s no one card you can use on all of them.). The place was a nice little house with 5 rooms, but it turns out that the big room is booked and one of the other rooms wouldn’t be available til the 16^th. But not all was lost, it just so happened that one of the tenants, Rah-nee Kelly, is here doing filmwork for a professor from Temple University- whose research just so happens to be Japanese hiphop and youth culture. What are the chances? I decided to stay in the vacant room for a few nights, since it was closer to all the places I would be looking at and they had wireless (the wireless in the hostel got cancelled for some reason or another). So I would move in the next day.

So we were off, Kimberly had some friends from University of Michigan here so we went to meet up with them in Shinjuku. Shin works as a finance person of some sort in a large company and Jeremy is a filmmaker who’s weaseling his way into film clubs at universities in the Tokyo area. Cool peoples. We met up, grabbed some food and drinks and went to relocate to a Karaoke bar for Jeremy’s birthday. I thought Korea had a big drinking culture (don’t get me wrong it has a huge drinking culture), but while I was there I only saw one person vomiting on the street. In my first night in Tokyo, I saw at least 3 people throwing up and trails of vomit someone left behind in the subway and it was a Thursday night! We spent the rest of the night playing darts and having good conversation to pass the time until the first train. Since cabs are prohibitively expensive (even for businessmen), Tokyo has lots of different things to do when you miss your last train- you can spend time in an internet café, which gives you a private booth and a recliner, you can play darts, sing karaoke, read manga, among other things. At around 4:30 we emerged from the dart bar and it was already bright out, damn the sun rises early (in the land of the rising sun, go figure). We went to McDonald’s to enjoy some egg mcmuffins while being surrounded by bunch of people passed out on tables.

hotel micky-d's

We walked to the famous intersection, shibuya crossing, the busiest intersection in Tokyo. People were slowly emerging from the bars and cafés, it was quiet and a flock of birds circled above.. very picturesque.

shibuya@ dawn

So that’s how Tokyo welcomed me. I didn’t sleep for another 24 hours (going on 48 hours with 3 hours of sleep).. just like a true Tokyoite. It's gonna be interesting here..