It`s funny... street workers here look just the same as everyday people, nothing like the glaring product for sale in St Kilda that I`m used to. How do I know about streetworkers here? The first thing we did when we got off the train from the airport is accidentally walk into the red-light district looking for food. Brilliant. Once realising that the little guys with big hairdoes in suits were the lowest in the hierarchy of gangsters, we backed up and found saviour in a tiny restaurant... what am I saying, everything here is tiny... well, not completely but you get what I mean... ummm... so to order in this resaurant, you put money into a vending machine, choose your meal, it spits out a ticket that you then give to the staff. The chef, who looks kinda evil but I`m sure he`s a great guy, even if he does talk funny like everyone else, whips up your meal in about sixty seconds.
Too verbose, too verbose, I`ll be here all night if I keep talking like this...
Accommodation is cute, traditional Japanese Ryokan... Terence and I are wondering how long before they kick us out for accidentally offending them... as we tend to come and go alot, laugh a lot, and say all the wrong things in response to their Japanese greetings... tadaima, tadaima, must remember tadaima....
my god, it is legal to drink on the street here! Drinking in bars/pubs is ridiculous though, two vodkas at the Green Apple was about $40!
Ok, ok, enough about drinking.
coffee... best coffee I have had was from a can.
hahah, the other night, Terence and I went back to the red-light district and went to the Hub... an English pub, where we encountered Troy from Boronia. Whoops, that was drinking-related again...
ummm... Shibuya, crazy, like from a film, lights, music, everywhere, people dressed exceptionally well, not quite on the scale of Fruits but getting there. Bought a DJ Krush EP from... hehe, HMV of all places, funny where you do go into when you are in a foreign country... but HMV here has a whole lot of flyers and stuff for clubs and gigs. And Tower records, which is huge too, also have an impressive collection of avant-garde/experimental music, and OMG I cant believe it ... Merzbow is playing on the last night that we are here!! ahhahahh AAAARRRRRRGHHHHHHHH!!!! Ive been oncloud 9 since I discovered that, he s playing with Bastard Noise somewhere in Shinjuku. jhmm...
washing here is interesting, no western showers at Homeikan RYokan... but being the prudish westerners that we are, we have shunned the public bath house and use the private `family` bathroom, which is the same gig but you can lock the door. oooh, the final bath in 40 degree water is heavenly, come out lobster. I kinda dig washing like that actually, waste less water and time, not that I usually ever give the impression of being against wasting time.
the bed, crikey... so first of all it`s about six inches too short, to be expected... the pillow! It`s like a rock! Filled with beans or husks or pebbles or something... and surprisingly comfortable.
Oh yeah the DJ Krush CD came with a bandana type thing, very brightly coloured, it`s nice, Bill Laswell is on the CD too. Yeah whatever, ok.
yeah had a look a Buddhist temple in Ueno, which is where we first got off the train from the airport and the red-light district is, well, we don`t _know_ that it is the red-light district, but this woman grabbed me by the elbow at one point and said it was five, or fifty, so I`m guessing 5000 yen (about $65) to have a beer with her. She wasn`t happy when I said "no thank-you", but they must have been thinking "stupid foreigners" about Terence and I, as we kept getting lost and walking in circles in that place, coming back to intersections we`d been at before just from another angle.
I think they`re more spun out about my long hair than about my mo.
Everyone here is really good looking, I`m not kidding. Well, the girls anyway. Well dressed, and just generally cute. And the schoolgirls, ohhhh the schoolgirls, now I understand! For a conservative society, hmm, nah, don`t get me started. Over and out.