Tokyo
WOW.
I guess that since i've never been to new york, i can't directly compare with an american city of similar size, but holy shit Tokyo is huge. It's weird because there is no one place where you can say, damn, i'm in the center of a really huge city. It's more like, "how long can this go on, i thought i just saw the same intersection last block." There is just no end to the big buildings, busy streets and hordes of people. It took us about 2 hours to find our friends at the train station. Admittedly it is kind of a big train station, but it wasn't so much the size as the sheer volume of people. Probably 1000 to 2000 people move through the Shibuya intersection every minute for most of the day. Just wait until the crosswalk sign illuminates and then it's like the running of the bulls or something. Tokyo is just straight up huge and crowded.

Now he'res the time line:
Jennifer and i left on the bus about 9 in the morning and i promptly fall asleep before i can learn any japanese. Then we arrive at about 1 in the afternoon when we have to check into the hotel and meet up with our friends Lara and Shane. We arrived at the hotel and found that the japanese man who owns the place speaks perfect english and loves to practice for hours at a time on all of his english speaking guests. We then left to meet up with lara and shane at Shibuya station. Unfortunately we didn't specify an exact spot and unfortunately it took us a long damn time to figure out where to meet but fortunately we did eventually meet up with them. I'm almost sold on the cell phone idea.
Then we went to find tickets to the movies because that was supposed to be the reason to go to tokyo right, to watch films. Unfortunately the only one not sold out while we were there was called Prosti and we weren't too thrilled by the prospects. We then decided to maybe see if we could find a showing of Kill Bill so we wandered around to a theater that was showing it. Shane and I waited in line for about an hour on the staircase to get into the theater. By the end things were sweltering and we were getting pretty crabby. Anyway, the movie was ok, but they must have gone through a tanker of the fake blood during the course of it.
We later wandered around and met up with some other people and proceeded to spend a ridiulous amount of money on drinks at a bar. Truly mystifying how it all flew out of my wallet so fast. We had to catch the last train home at 12:50, which is truly an early last train time for a city that is so big and so busy all night long. At any rate we weren't satisfied with the drinking and so we searched around for a bar or izakaya or something to top off the night with but were ultimately unsuccessful.


more about sunday later