Yesterday was, to put it in sophisticated language -as I am a sophisticated lady- totally amazeballs.
It was a Saturday in Tokyo filled with:
meeting my friend Rika in the most amazing starbucks ever (as far as Starbucks get amazing), on a huge but cosy terrace right in the middle of the city, with trees and little flowers and flowery bushes framing a view on the busy streets, and confy benches you could totally fall asleep on, hamac-like chairs hanging from branches, wooden decks,... Once again we had a 2 hour long half English half Japanese conversation we hadn't plan. It was a perfect spot. I will remember it.
We had planned to go see some cherry blossom, but picture an ex agoraphobic and a borderline one, on a sunny Saturday afternoon, the first of April, going to where the whole of Tokyo goes... yep, that was just not going to happen. The souk in Jerusalem and the opening of the sales in Paris are like a thermal cure compared to Tokyo on the first week end of the cherry trees blossoming. It was crowded as in you don't know what colour the pavement is.
So we saw a tree from far away when crossing harajuku bridge, looked at each other, and agreed that would be our hanami for today.
I had finished all the book in English I had brought and bought here, so to Tower Record we went, via a skateshop for the brother. Rika wants to improve her English, so she had picked up
On the road. I took it from her hands, threw it over my shoulder and in her hand still open I put
The curious incident of the dog at night, wishing I hadn't already read it so I could read it for the first time again.
I have finished the trilogy
Our Ancesters from Italo Calvino,
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Wilde, and an autobiography from Orwell amongst other. I will never read any non-fiction from George Orwell ever again from fear of puking (
Up and Down London and Paris was plainly racist, sexist, pouring with hastily written theories about bullshit the guy pretends to know about when really it is very clear he doesn't, anyways, never ever again).
I love Tower Record because I feel like the staff are my mates and we could go for coffee and chat about good movies - when really, we couldn't at all, they just happen to be Japanese and to be working, and my European brain process their attitude totally the wrong way. But it gives me that impression everytime I go anyways.
So I picked up a collection of short stories by Gabriel Marcia Marquez as I had enjoyed the yellowed, musty smelling pages of Lea's copy of
One Hundred Years Of Solitude (merci Léa) and because I have been swimming among classics (books and movies), I thought I would allowed myself to try something different and picked up T
he girl with the dragon tatoo (it was also really cheap...).
So then our heads were spinning because we had laughed and spoken so much it was 4 pm and we hadn't eaten. At all.
Rika remembered a Kaiten Sushi (where sushis roll around a belt) where everything is a hundred yen (that's £0.58 or 0.71€ a plate of 6 makis or 3 sushis). So you pick up vegan or non vegan makis, kappa makis, oshinko makis, inari sushi, everything is 100 yen a plate. Cheese I love Japan.
But that wasn't the best part. We go in, and where I had expected to find an old sort-of-sweet smelling dirty wooden place I find a clinical looking room, white walls white lights.
They give you a number, and like in a hotel where you go find a room, you go find your numbered sit within a row of people already eating in their washed white light.
You sit facing a screen that is slightly above your head, and that's where you order - literally, you put your finger on the picture of what you want (pickled aubergine with wasabi sushi? What was that again about vegans bound to miss on every food and/or social occasion while in Japan?) and that's where it peacks:
in front of you, under the screen, are three vertical tracks. Your sushi comes about 2 minutes after you order it, flying down the track out of nowhere, passes all the other eaters aligned on your right and left and stops in front of you.
You then press a little yellow face button, and 'pppffiiooouuwww': it flies away again back to wherever it came from, moving at a high speed. (Do you like my sound effect? Yeah I know... Was never really good at written sound effects - I must really look for a class to improve my lack of skills in the matter).
I was laughing so much I could barely eat at first. Rika now knows 'whooot?!' as well as 'what'. Anyways it was delicious and cheap, especially as Rika decided to pay for me as I had bought her a coffee earlier (which was the same price as a full meal, don't ask).
I wanted to go to ping pong practice in Kanda from 6 to 9 (where, again, I am the only girl, and the only one under 40, and, hell yeah - the only foreigner too), but by the time I looked again at my watch it was way past that time and I had used most of my energy ignoring the crowd.
Then somehow Rika pushed me in - ready for the new Japanese word of the day? - a PURIKURA.
It's an entire floor or several floors filled with photo boots and young women dressed in high heels making high pitched sounds. So you go into the boot, and it prompts you to take poses against a green background that gets magically filled with soft colours and random English words, and it's kind of fun to do with a mate.
Until you realise there is an algorithm that:
-Makes your skin super smooth (ok...)
-Makes your lips and cheeks a different colour (computer generated make up, alright I can deal with this...)
-Makes your eyes about three times their normal size, so you pretty much look like a 3 year old if you are asian. If you happen to have caucasian eyes, which is my case (well I didn't choose my parents, did you?) it makes you look exactly like this:
Then you have taken enough duck-lips poses (they do prompt you to do this, and I thought it was my duty as a human being to disobey), you go in another little boot where you can add more random English words that don't really end up being sentences, stars and glitter and hearts and sh... and stuff.
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| Wtf moment of the month, there you are. |
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| Bonjour, j'ai 5 ans et demi. |
And then I didn't want to go but as I had walked the whole day with my ping-pong shoes and bat and clothes, I thought it would be silly not to go, so I left Rika around 7pm and had a run all the way between the station and the gymnasium.
Note to oneself: don't run with normal clothes on in general, and a long sleeved shirt in particular as you won't make more friends by having sweat patches under your arms.
After buying my ticket from the machine to play (yes, you always buy tickets from machine next to a human being in Japan - there is a receptionist, but her job with me is to tell me what button on the machine I have to press and handing me a different 100 yen coins when mine is burped back by the machine -you also buy a ticket from a machine right next to a human being when you want to go to the public bath, to buy a towel, to add some soap you buy another ticket from the machine, to spend a night in a capsule hotel, to buy a hot bottle of lemon tea drink in the middle of nowhere, to charge your metro pass...).
So I bought my ticket and had a short but really effective play with a couple of guys until my arm hurt from trying to shoot the guy on the other side of the table with a ball as low and fast as I possibly could make it go. I managed to get a few 'na-ee-suuu' (nice), and other onomatope from my opponent that I won't reproduce as I already mentioned earlier I'm not half as good at them as I am at table tennis. Then I jumped in the shower before running again to get the last train home - with all that cherry blossom panic I was unable to find a single bed in all of the Tokyo hostels.
If you find showers that clean in any public gymnasium in England or France, I'll buy you a cookie. There was not one single hair on the ground, not a patch of mold on the curtains, it was literally spotless. I guess the very fact I find this surprising tells enough about the difference in cleanliness in public spaces in Japan and other places in the world. Then it was 9 pm, and so they played a little 9 pm song or two, typical of what I have heard in Japan so far: covers of European songs from the 70s or 80s on a virtual synthesizer (either that or Ghibli music made airy with enough tinkles to make you light headed).
Enough to want to die if you're not in the mood for an '
Aux Champs Elysée' played with one hand - if not just one finger - on a keyboard on a screen.
Then I took the shinkansen and fell asleep and once home watched
Mr Smith goes to Washington (1939) which I highly recommend because it was flipping great, and in the middle I spoke with the brother in the Johannesburg airport after he saw dolphins and surfed down a sand dune, you know, after work. He has the beard of Abraham Lincoln, brown and blond, and the little of his face exposed to the sun is totally burned, so he somehow can also claim a resemblance with this
animal.
Then it was 3 am and in the morning, it was snowing again.
Yes. Snowing. AGAIN.
So I had 5 yorkshire teas and 4 yogi teas to counter balance them and it'll be fine.
Somehow it is now 3.30 pm and I have no idea how it happened, but the snow has stopped so I'm going to check the mountain chain is still there at the top of the view point and then go to the onsen check out naked japanese women and lying in a boiling bath outside with trees above my head.
