Sitting on comfortable seats in a wooden booth, we watched as all manner of strange and outlandish sushi dishes whizzed by us on a conveyor belt. For your consideration I submit these exhibits:
Hanako and Akiko ordered poached salmon and green onion tuna for us, which we washed down with Asahi beer and Miso soup. The Miso soup had a crab in it. Not crab meat, not an ornamental crab's leg. A crab. I half expected it to jump out and do a jig for freedom if I rattled the bowl hard enough.
We then had a variety of increasingly exotic sushi dishes thrown at us. Everything was quite delicious aside from the sea urchin, which quite frankly tasted like a rotting corpse's gym sock and required more than one piece of pickled ginger to exorcise from the palate. Ram's balls ain't got nothing on this, baby.
After the pleasant fifteen-minute walk back home, Krust and I headed out to the liquor store to stock up on biru for the evening's festivities. Along the way, fully embodying my role as gawping wide-eyed gaijin, I stopped in a couple of places to snap some shots. Here are two:
A short afternoon nap later, the Hodemonster took Krust and I into the darkest heart of the Shinjuku ward. Shinjuku is one of the skyscraper neighborhoods, where neon, steel and liquid crystal vie for airspace - the kind of thing most people imagine when they think "Tokyo." The purpose of our trip was to hit an electronics store (something the area is absolutely rife with) to find a net cable for Krust's laptop, and to experience this crazy neighborhood.
Hodezor had promised us that he would take us to the best ramen place in Tokyo, a promise he promptly fulfilled. The place kind of reminded us of Nonnabiti, except that the guys behind the counter were dressed like butchers, with grimy aprons and huge boots. Somebody needs to kill the noodles, I guess.
This was what we got:
It was very good indeed. The soup reminded me of Miso soup, spicy with a bitter edge, and the noodles themselves were just right. It did get a little rich towards the end, though; on the whole, I think I'm a bigger fan of the chinese-style ramen we got on the first day.
The neighborhood this ramen parlor was located in was Kabukicho, a district of Shinjuku that is particularly known for sex shops, soap houses and love hotels. We walked through some of the main streets there, taking great pleasure in being solicited by young Japanese women for "one hour massage, 20.000 yen" and telling them that, sorry, we were gay and on our way to have a threesome in the nearest love hotel.
The area itself, though, is a wonderland of neon and debauchery, and so I naturally felt compelled to snap a few shots.
After this we hit a few of the arcades (Shinjuku is rife with them), where Hodezor showed me a game that seems to have been created entirely with me in mind. It's a game called "Typing of the Dead," and it revolves around two "agents" who travel through a zombie-infested city with keyboards strapped to themselves, which they somehow use to kill zombies. The point of the game is to type the word in front of each zombie to kill it. Naturally, I ruled at it. Since the words themselves were all in Japanese, though, I died on Level 5's endboss. He killed me with the word KYUKITSUROHEKIMENFUCHAKUNENRYOSEKISANRYO. Or something.
Next up, we headed back out into the streets of Shinjuku to hunt for Krust's cable and take a gander around this bad motherfucker of a neighborhood. Shinjuku is really amazing; it's the epitome of Tokyoness. A bastion of big-city commerce and business with a seedy underbelly, a place where you can quite literally get anything you want.
After we got the cable sorted, Hodezor took us down the street to a store called Don Quijote's (the building on the right in the right-hand picture above), which has absolutely everything. You might think I'm joking (I thought he was joking when he first told us), but I'm dead serious; this store stocks every single thing in the world.
It's 5 stories of labyrinthine corridors that carry every piece of merchandise you can possibly imagine. From the basement (which offers foodstuffs, snacks and alcohol) to the top floor (where you can get fancy-pantsy brand-name clothing at discount prices), you can find absolutely anything you are looking for. School supplies, musical instruments, 20 different kinds of dildoes, cameras, novelty prank items, wristwatches, music, movies, porno movies, mountain bikes, Ipods, underwear, lingerie, gardening equipment, computer accessories, jewelry, books, La-Z Boys, toys, shoes, alarm clocks, rice cookers, washing machines - you get the picture. And all of it shacked up together in an incongruous labyrinth of shelves hanging lopsided over each other, ready to break under the weight of the colorful chaos piled upon them.
I took a couple of pictures in there (the staff frowns upon picture-taking, so I had to be all ninja about it). One of them illustrates the general level of stuffed crampity evidenced all throughout the store, while the other is an example of the monetary lengths to which Japanese fashion victims will go to victimize themselves (as well as being a borderline second Engrish entry into this dear old blog).
Chip chip, motherfucker. Sheeit. And for only 9800 yen, which translates to 5525 ISK or just under $84 USD. The same label (Dsquared) also had a fairly nice yellow hoodie for sale, for the bargain bin price of only 44,900 yen. That's 25,315 ISK, $385 USD. And this is a discount store.
Man, I love this city.
After getting lost in Don Quijote's for the best part of two hours, we wandered back out into the bustling streets of Shinjuku and took a left down an alley, straight into the movie Blade Runner.
It was uncanny. On either side as we walked down the alley, tiny cramped yakitori establishments and ramen joints collided with each other, ancient regulars sitting at the bar-like counters with scant inches of space between their backs and the wall, smoke rising everywhere, the dim light of red lamps mixing with the row of fluorescent overhead lights, the proprietors of every establishment shouting at us in Japanese as we walked past, trying to lure us into trying their chicken-on-a-stick or their bowl of luscious ramen. The place was alive, truly alive; the kind of alive you just don't see everywhere. We quickly decided that we'll go and eat there very soon.After this, we headed for Shinjuku station (which, by the way, is the busiest train station in the world, passing three million people through its bowels every day), where, just before we walked into the station, we heard the beguiling sounds of Herbie Hancock's 'Cantaloupe Island' being absolutely jacked into the fifth dimension, live. Deciding to walk a bit further on and risk missing our train, we came upon these gentlemen:
They were, in a word, insane. The drummer was constructing evolving patterns of off-syncopated rhythms which still made your booty want to shake uncontrollably, the clarinet player seemed to have a fast forward button for his fingers, and the bassist had a sense of rhythm that enabled him to effortlessly rein in the experimental instincts of his brothers in arms. We were sad to have to leave.
A short train ride later, we were home.
At this point the evening's craziness began. After changing clothes and downing a couple of beers at home, we went to a traditional Japanese restaurant/bar to meet up with some of the Hodemonster's friends from school. A few beers, some good conversation and a whole lot of delicious food later, the three of us headed out to Womb.
Womb is one of those clubs that remind you what clubbing is really like outside the ridiculously restricted confines of Iceland's loud-bar culture. We met up with Wayne and a few other guys, and just basically partied our asses off for six hours. The place was perfect; a bottom floor with a lounge area and a bar that played electro house, the main dance floor on the 2nd floor under a huge dome, with Total Science playing mad drum and bass and a bunch of people going absolutely mental, and then a third floor that circumscribes the 2nd, with a window view of all the crazy shit going on down on the floor. The crowd was nice and international, and we met a lot of interesting people.
After the club closed we headed out to Wayne's house for an afterparty, where we drank more beer and played Playstation soccer way into the wee hours. Funny how similar a night out partying in Tokyo is to a night out partying in Reykjavík. You know, aside from there not being a single decent nightclub in Reykjavík, the crowd not being as diverse, and the beer costing three times as much.
Oh, well. At least we have good music.
Today has been spent in a hangover haze. We went out for burgers at a neighborhood joint called "Freshness Burger," where a manically chipper lady served us beer and sweaty burgers. Aside from that, we've just stayed in, watched Japanese TV and drunk warm sake. What tomorrow brings, nobody knows. Stay tuned.
Smoochies.
