A Honeymoon in Asia - Tokyo - Day 1


Two almost disastrous things happened involving the shinkansen.  In the morning just before leaving the house we realized that Jen had thrown away our tickets (we got them back).  Then once on the bullet train we sat down and Jen said "where's your backpack (with camera, laptop, etc..)"?  I looked around, then looked out the window and saw it sitting on the platform.  I bolted out, grabbed it and the doors started shutting on me as i made it back onto the train.  
after taking the bullet train to tokyo we had lunch with John and Masako and high tailed it over to Shinjuku Gyoen, the nicest park in Tokyo (used to emperors golf course so the grass is fairway grass).  It costs $3 to get in so it keeps the riff raff out (which you'll see later as we join them at Yoyogi park).  This is an array of Tokyo buddies including my old roommate Naoki and Ritsuko and new child.  Johnny was my roommate in Albany too.



the park closed early at 4pm for some reason (maybe its like that everyday, everyone seemed surprised and sad about it).  There was no way they were gonna get that many people out of the park so we were there until 5:30.  The park peeps make a kind of walking line, sweeping people out as they slowly went across the park.
it was a little after peak bloom so that made magical petal showers when the wind blew.
Ai said they don't check bags at the Sendagaya gate of the park but they did this day, but they only looked with their eyeballs for a milisecond so if you hide your stuff in the bottom of your bag with chips on top you'll be fine.
bye Yuri Buri from FIT and Fumika's hometown, see you next time.

we made our way over to Yoyogi park because it's free and open 24 hrs.  It's more like the party park.  By the time we got there there were people falling over, sleeping in mud, etc...  Agnes from New York and Japan came shortly after Stevie and his brother David found us.


We went to Doma Doma, a chain izakaya and the only real option to fit our big group (we tried Niku Yokocho, a building where the inside looks like a huge crazy shotengai with various eating places, but there was no way we could fit this many people).  After that we went to this beer place in Shibuya and I was super sleepy and took these spicy eyedrops to try to stay awake, looks like the girl behind me did the same thing at the same time.  That lasted for about a minute so we drank little sweet Japanese coffees from the convenience store 2x and went to this pagoda of bars in Shibuya near tokyu hands.

We landed on Rock No Cocoro 
This was the only day where our schedule over lapped with Steven and his brother's and we definitely went big.


Japanese folk will sleep anywhere


it was hot in there and this guy was wearing a lined rain jacket and thrashing around and really feeling DJ Tanuki's music (i made up that name)


It was basically a group of like 6 DJ friends pumping their fists at the DJ booth and then switching places and so on

we went to the hip hop bar on the top floor for one drink and sent Steven's brother back down to the rock bar to talk to some girls and he actually did it.  When we went back down he was talking to a girl and in order to help him out we stayed and drank until 5am.  He got her number so, success.



sleeping anywhere

this Tanuki turned out to be completing the teacher's training course at my old Japanese language school.  We took the first train home at 5 something and died.  What a night.



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