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antpowerSo, I've been home for about a week now, but I've been in a bit of a post-holiday slump, so I haven't posted or done much of anything useful, really. Anyway, so I finally have pictures uploaded and whatnot, so I figured it was about time I posted about my trip and tried to get rid of my not-being-in-Japan-anymore blues!!
I can't actually find my travel diary, so I'm going on memory here, which means I'll probably leave stuff out, but oh wells.
Our flight was horrible. We had to be at the airport at like 4.30am and I'd had my tooth out the day before, so I got hardly any sleep, and then our flight got delayed at the Gold Coast for like four hours. This is me at the Gold Coast. I am not happy. It was $6.50 for a chocolate milk. Oh!! I have chocolate milk in the fridge!!
Once we got to Osaka, we realised how much unnecessary stuff we'd packed. I actually had blisters on my hand from my suitcase. We ended up dumping most of our stuff later on, but then we bought so much JE merchandise that it was nearly as heavy coming back anyway, but it was a happy kind of heavy!! XP
Even though we were really tired when we got there, we wanted to have a look around, so we went out to get food. We were staying on Dotonburi, which was awesome. All the guys looked like idols!! Only gayer! But they were hitting on girls, so it made us reevaluate our assessment of Arashi's hetrosexuality. Or something. Anyway, we went and got ramen and it was awesome.
There were these three guys in the ramen place who had been on our plane and they were very friendly and nice and wanted to take pictures of us. They didn't look like idols, but they look much better than we do at that point!! XP
We didn't actually eat at the place with the giant mechanical crab, but we did get CRABS TO WEAR ON OUR HEADS anyway!! I am not actually drunk in this picture, despite looks.
We spent the next day looking for the Osaka Johnny's shop, but the directions we were given were dodgy, so we just walked around and looked at shops, mainly. We got hit on by these two school kids, they were really cute, but seriously, they were in their school uniforms!! A lot of the directions we were given to places from people's websites or whatever were really bad, I feel like maybe I should make some sort of post at some point about how not to be wandering around Japan like a dick looking for JE stuff or something. Anyway, for the first week or so we were there we got very excited every time we saw idols advertising stuff!! Here is the very first time we saw idols on a vending machine! And thus began our Epic Quest to find Jun-kun advertising Pepsi Nex!!
Everywhere we went there were huge NEWS HAPPY BATH DAY displays!! It was a time of happiness!!
Idol-advertised products are superior to other products!! I bought Jin-flavoured lip cream, which actually doesn't taste like incredibly hot manwhore at all, but more like strawberries!!! I love how they put the sticker over Junno's face!! ROFL.
But the happiest thing of all was CRUNKY!! We ate a lot of Crunky, but figured it's okay because it's endorsed by Kame and he's like the thinnest person ever!
Anyway, we found the Johnny's shop the next day and bought fans, yay!! The Osaka shop wasn't that busy, we just walked straight in, but the staff there were mighty unfriendly. We have this theory about how, like you know people who work in sweet shops are really sour? We think that people who work in the Johnny's shop have had all their sparkly sucked our or something. The girl yelled at me in her weird Kansai dialect because I didn't put my NEWS stuff on a seperate sheet to my Arashi stuff - so sorry![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
starfishdance, I didn't get you any awesome Yamapi stuff there. I really wanted to get an Ohno fan but they had sold out, so I got a Nino one instead, and then the girl yelled at me for calling Sho "Sho" instead of "Sakurai-kun".
Then we took Sho and Nino to lunch!!
We were going to take them to the aquarium as well, but we thought they might get hurt, and Nino doesn't really like the sea, so we left them in our hotel room.
The aquarium was awesome!! We went on the huge ferris wheel first and then this guy talked us going into his ninja maze, which was basically just this maze thing where stuff jumped out at you or whatever. It was fun though, and I totally didn't react like Aiba in the haunted house. This is me on the ferris wheel.
I really loved the aquarium!! I loved the otters!
The whale sharks were very impressive. We have video!
There was this guy cleaning the windows and we accidentally took video of him too.
And the jellyfish were very hypnotic.
That night we watched Himitsu (the one where they got pwnd by the little girls at table tennis) and decided that it was better to drink our 4 litres of duty-free booze than to carry it. This was probably not a good plan, as we actually managed a whole litre of vodka and had to catch the bullet train to Tokyo the next day. But at least we had previously thought to get our Japanese teacher to teach us how to ask for painkillers for being hungover!! I was very proud of myself for remembering!
I have decided that when I grow up, I want to drive the bullet train! I love the bullet train so much!! They have this trolley girl with awesome food and she wears a nifty little uniform with a hat and gloves! <3333
Anyway, so I posted about it before, but we got to Tokyo in peak hour. It wasn't nearly as bad as I expected, seriously the trains run so often that they weren't that packed or anything, the worst part was our heavy bags. This is the point where my sister saw Kame but I didn't. She said he is taller than she expected and has amazing eyes, and all in all is much better-looking in RL. But still not the Best Jeanist in Japan. She now wishes she had've said to him, "stop shagging old women and beating up cab drivers and go play with the otters like a good boy", but oh well, sometimes you miss these opportunities in life.
Anyway, we somehow managed to get our bags from Tokyo station to Shimbashi and then we had to get the subway to Asakusa, and that is where the Stairs of Doom defeated us. These are the Stairs of Doom.
We decided to go sit down for a while and investigate the possibility of escalators or maybe even an elevator!! But nobody we asked had any idea. The old guy next to me and my bags said there wasn't any and we were going to offer him duty-free booze in exchange for carrying our bags, but we thought he might be offended. Also, we weren't sure how to say that in Japanese.
So, we decided to brave the stairs on our own and that's when the PRINCE appeared and carried our bags for us. The PRINCE was my favourite person we met in all of Japan, he was incredibly good-looking and chivalrous, and if they sold the PRINCE uchiwas, I surely would've bought one. <3333333
Anyway, we finally got to Asakusa, after a long and perilous journey. This is our room.
It was small. It was so small, there wasn't room for both our clothes and our uchiwas, so we had to combine the two!!
We decided to go eat but the girl at the place gave us weird directions and we got lost and wandered around Asakusa for like three hours. We ate good food and then met a friendly policeman who drew us a map. Anyway, we saw that famous giant lantern thingie.
Anyway, the next day was Saturday and we went to Kisarazu!! We weren't quite sure how to get there, but we figured if we just headed in the general Chiba direction we'd be fine and we were!! On the train we met this nice lady who kept getting her daughter to talk to us. The nice lady was born in Kisarazu and she loved Bussan!! <333 When we got off the train, she made her daughter ask us if we needed help finding anything, but all we really wanted at that point was coffee, so she told us where to get coffee and that was awesome.
After coffee we went to find the red bridge. I don't think Kisarazu gets many Westerners, or tourists at all, and everyone was looking at us like we were lost and this guy randomly took a photo of us. We were like minor celebrities or something!! Anyway, so decided to go find the red bridge but first we found this supermarket and guess what we found there???!?!! INCREDIBLY OVERPRICED FRUIT!!
That made us happy!! Anyway, then we found the bridge.
We walked over the bridge and it was kind of emotional. I don't know why. Possibly I was just overtired. Well, my sister says it's because we were "walking in the footsteps of Sakurai Sho", but that seems kind of lame. I think I was just so happy to be where I was right then, you know? Anyway, everyone had signed their names on the bridge, so we did too and then we headed back into the town. My sister took like 1000 pictures of raccoon dogs, but I would feel bad posting a couple and not all of them, so I won't post any, but if you're really interested you can see them all in my sister's facebook folder thinger.
Anyway, we were wandering around and came across this little junk shop place, and because it had a Cat's Eye poster in the window, we went to take a look. This little old guy ran it and he was sitting in his chair smoking and watching the baseball, he was the cutest old person ever. He had all this stuff in his shop from the show, like the t-shirts with like Bambi and Bussan on the back and their baseball numbers, so I asked him how much they were but they weren't for sale. Then we had a look around and noticed all this other stuff he had, like these photo boards of him getting drunk with the cast and this huge board thing they'd all signed. This is the huge board thing.
I also got very emotional when I saw Okada Junichi had written "Bussan will never die". Ah, I really loved those cats though!! The old guy also had the actual Ozi statue from the show!!
He was selling some other stuff, so we bought it, like YASSAI MOSSAI t-shirts and stuff. He gave us a heap of free stuff too, he was so sweet!!! Then we went and had coffee at this place that was playing weird cover versions of like Kylie Minogue songs and stuff and they charged us 1000 YEN EACH FOR A TINY LITTLE COFFEE!! That was the only un-awesome thing about Kisarazu though.
We also had awesome ramen there. The ramen guy was also very sweet and took a picture of us.
The next day we went to Harajuku and looked at the fake idol shops, but decided to come back when it was less busy to buy stuff, as we were getting totally pwnd by little girls when we tried to look at stuff. One girl who was like six years old told me that she wouldn't lose to me, and you know what? She was right. Then we went to Yoyogi Park. It was full of cute kids in kimono.
We wandered around and saw the Meiji shrine and whatnot, and then stumbled onto this agricultural market thing. They had lots of free food samples, awesome miso and cakes and so forth. The people on the stalls were all so nice!! This guy talked to us for like half an hour in Japanese about regrowth forests, and we surprisingly understood him!! He really talked forever though. But the most awesome thing about the market???
That's right, it's a BOAT MADE OUT OF VEGETABLES!! I'm pretty sure Arashi are going to try to sail it to Rainbow Bridge at some point in the near future! XD
That night we went to Shibuya, because we were staying at a hotel there the next weekend and had to change our reservation, but we couldn't find the hotel, due to more bad directions. That was okay though, because what we did find was the MR KEIO CONTEST!!!
I was going for the guy on this end, but I have no idea who won. It was actually just a part of the Miss Keio contest, which was also awesome, as they were giving out these gift bags with awesome cosmetics and things in them. You know what else is awesome? Pachinko! And more awesome than that even is STAR WARS PACHINKO!! Here is the truck advertising it!
Shibuya is the greatest place on the planet, but more on that later.
We were going to go to the sushi train near Asakusa station on the way home, but it was surrounded by police and fire trucks and A HAZMAT VAN!! We decided maybe we should give it a miss and had curry rice instead. We never actually got around to having sushi at all after that.
So, the next day was Culture Day and there was a parade in Asakusa with everyone dressed up in traditional costumes and whatnot.
It was pretty awesome, but the camera died right near the start. We were sitting near this nice lady and her family who decided to take care of us and make sure we were warm enough and could see and what not. People in Japan are so lovely!! It got really freezing halfway through, so we went and sat in this coffee shop and watched the rest out of the upstairs windows. People did dances and these samurai guys had a sword fight and stuff.
Went to Akihabara and bought new headphones. They are awesome. Also saw cosplayers, yay!!!
I had this amazing Hayashi Rice for dinner. I think it's like the one meal we don't have a picture of, but it really was super-awesome. XDDDD
Then we met up withexdream1999 for karaoke!! She is so sweet!! We sang Arashi and SMAP and also classic rock and we ate marine-flavoured icecream. I was very amazed at her awesome rapping skillz! The background video things told this Epic Tale of the Forbidden Love of these two guys who were possibly hosts!! It was awesome! She had to go and catch her train, but then we got to talking about Arashi and whatnot for ages, I hope she didn't miss the train!! <3333
Went back to our hotel/backpackers. Because we didn't have a TV in our room we had to go to the common room/bar place because we wanted to watch News Zero/Shukudai, but there were people playing the Wii. D: Luckily they were pretty drunk and the nice American girl convinced them to let us watch our stories. There was this sweet guy working behind the bar called Nobu-kun, who loved Yamapi and he was really amused by our reactions at the TV. Had a conversation with this Australian girl about whether or not Sho had a blemish on his cheek. It was a bit surreal.
We had to change hotels the next day and go to Ikebukuro, and we didn't want to carry more booze, so we gave some to the nice girl who let us watch the TV. She was very happy.
This is Ikebukuro West Gate Park. There isn't actually a statue of The King there. Or anyone who looked like Naguse/Yamapi. Or even gang members!! It was mostly old drunk guys.
Went to Ueno Zoo, mostly because I wanted to get one of those hand puppet things like Domyouji got for Makino, but it was closed.
Heard this old lady talking about Domyouji though, so that kind of made up for it. XP We looked around Ueno for a bit and then... I can't really remember but I think we went back to the hotel for naps. And later on we walked around the east side of Ikebukuro, which was much less seedy than our side. That was a pretty disappointing day, actually.
Wednesday we got up early because my sister wanted to run around the Imperial Palace.
Then we went back to Ikebukuro and had coffee. The coffee girl was sweet and made a bunny on my coffee.
That was the day we decided to go to the Aiba Family Restaurant, only we didn't really check up about it, so after getting there and finally finding it after bad directions, we found it was closed!!! Oops!! So we went to Shibuya so we could get the new Arashi single from Tower Records. They had a nifty little display where you could watch the Beautiful Days PV!! I totally didn't go crazy and spend all my money on magazines and CDs and DVDs or anything. Well, maybe a little, but that's okay, right??? On the way back on the train, we were looking through the Arashi photobook my sister bought and the old guy sitting next to her was reading over her shoulder! It was so funny, we think he really loved Matsujun.
I always wondered if people in Japan really got swindled all the time, or if it was just a convenient plotline for dramas, but then we realised it must be a problem, because there are ANTI-SWINDLING signs up!! DON'T GET SWINDLED AT THE ATM!!
Went back to Ikebukuro and went to Otome Road, only we were a bit tired and stuff by that point, so we didn't stick around long. We went to this place that was supposed to be a Gyoza Stadium, only it was like this stupid amusement place where you had to pay to get in and then you got ripped off by exotic-sounding but ordinary-tasting gyoza at all these stalls. We decided we didn't really like staying in Ikebukuro all that much, as it was seedy and nearly everything had gone wrong while we were there. There was one awesome thing about it though!!
On the Thursday we decided to catch the ferry to Odaiba. My sister is obsessed with Rainbow Bridge and took like 1000 photos of it. This is one.
Odaiba... I thought it was a bit lame. I think it's for couples. Everything was like about having your first kiss, which amused me because of that D no Arashi episode where they stalk the couple who are about to have their first kiss. Seriously though, there were even jewellery shops that sold stuff "for the anniversary of your first kiss". We went to the Fuji TV studio and all these school kids were hanging around where the people come out, so we joined the crowd for shits and giggles. We asked this couple who they were waiting for, but they didn't understand English or Japanese. Anyway, this guy came out and got in a car and everyone went crazy, so we went crazy too, even though we had no idea who he was. We later found out he was from that band "Breakerz" or something. It was funny, anyway.
Then we looked around the TV studio. There was lots of SMAP and Tokio stuff everywhere but only one little picture of Arashi. I felt kind of offended. We really wanted to ask where they kept the Falling Pipe Catch stuff but we thought they'd think we were weird. Seriously, though. If I were running that place I'd set it up so you could actually do the Falling Pipe Catch and Rolling Coin Tower. That's what the people want!!! We went up to this big round observation deck thing, because the ferris wheel looked too windy, and we looked at stuff. There was this thing where you could get a video of you being a newscaster, but we didn't do it.
The ferris wheel looked really pretty at night.
So did Rainbow Bridge.
We caught the monorail back, but we got on it THE WRONG WAY! I thought monorails only went one day! You know, mono meaning one, rail meaning rail!
We decided to go to Ginza and get us some high class cuisine, but there was some sort of emergency at Shimbashi station so we didn't want to catch the subway.
We decided to walk to Ginza and got pretty much lost. At least it wasn't bad directions this time, but our own bad sense of direction. Anyway, we got there and decided to go to the Sony Building, because it was open for like another 12 minutes. The Sony Building... well I didn't see much of it, on account of they were playing this camera ad on a loop with Okada Junichi and he looked really hot, so we spent the 12 minutes looking at that. They actually had to kick us out, I think. I should download that ad.
Ginza is really quiet.
We went to this little sake bar, and the waiter recommended a heap of stuff for us. No idea what some of it was but it was really awesome!!
You know what I really loved about Japan? The trains! They are punctual and you can't talk on your phone and it is nice and convenient for naps!! People nap on the train all the time and don't even miss their stop! Sometimes they get off at their stop while they're still asleep!! Sometimes we just went and caught the train for the heck of it. It was nice. Comforting.
At our hotel in Ikebukuro, you had to watch the TV in the downstairs cafe, so the girl put on Himitsu for us. She was really happy because she loves Sho, so she kept bussing the tables in our area, even though there were no other customers. XP Arashi really brings the people together!!!
That night was kind of awful because we'd had to change from our twin room to a double, so my sister and I had to share a bed. I ended up sleeping on the floor, it was much more comfortable!!
The next day we moved from that hotel to our hotel in Shibuya. It was such a beautiful hotel! We had seperate rooms!!!!!
And the cafe downstairs made this awesome French Toast. It was just... awesome.
Anyway, so we decided to go to the Aiba Family Restaurant again and this time it was open!! There was this huge line of girls waiting to go in, so we joined the line and wrote our names on this list and watched all the people eating delicious food inside. OMG, we were so hungry!! The girls in the line kept looking at us like we were lost, but they were friendly enough anyway. So, a few people left and we got to sit in the waiting area. I'm sure anybody who cares has seen pictures of it anyway, which is good because I did take some pictures but I CAN'T FIND THEM!! It was mainly just autographs of the members - there was one from Nino dated on Aiba's birthday a few years ago, which I thought was sweet. And also a huge drawing of Aiba that somebody had done. They have this book there so that you can write a message to Aiba, and we wrote stuff, basically "thank you for being the most awesome person ever". I tried to draw a happy little rainbow, but it came out looking like... I don't even know what. A splodge? My sister said Aiba will know what it is, on account of being in a band with Sho though.
Anyway, then we met Aiba's mother. She's so lovely!! She looks just like him, only shorter and more like a woman. She was really dignified, I was really impressed by her. It seemed like even though the place was full of fangirls, she was kind of above it somehow, but not in a snooty way or anything. It's hard to explain. Anyway, then we got seated and at that point we were kind of more worried about food than anything else. THE FOOD WAS SO AWESOME OMG!
This is our second plate of gyoza, it was so awesome we couldn't stop eating before this to take a picture.
And I had this awesome frozen melon dessert thing, I swear it is the best thing I've eaten in my life.
We really wanted to come back every day after that for lunch, but we thought we'd look like crazy stalkers, instead of just food-obsessed piggies!! All around the restaurant were pictures that Aiba's brother had taken, they were really amazing pictures. It kind of made me really happy that both brothers had an equal representation there. When we left, my sister dropped her wallet that had like 70000 yen in it, and the girls who had been in the line with us ran after us to give it to her! So nice!! Once again, Arashi is the symbol of goodness in the world, or something!! XD
That night we decided to go out in Shibuya, as we hadn't really seen any nightlife at all. There were these guys outside the station giving away FREE HUGS!!! This is the worst picture of me ever, but this guy really did give great hugs.
Spent ages wandering around but everywhere was food places and we were still stuffed from lunch! We ended up going to this soccer bar because we couldn't find anywhere else. They had cheap cocktails and the bar girl told us we looked really glamorous, like we were "from Sex & the City: the Movie"!! I'm not sure if that's a compliment or not, or if there's any difference between the movie and the TV show, but I chose to be flattered anyway.
We left there because it was boring and tried to find another bar, so we ended up going into this ramen place, but they were about to close, so we asked these two guys sitting near us where a bar was. One of the guys, we call him "Blonde Guy", jumped up and told us to come with him and took off down the street. He showed us this Irish bar or something but we said we wanted a Japanese one, so he told us to hang on and went back to his friend and finished his beer and paid and dragged his friend out and set off on a Quest To Find A Bar! He negotiated with this guy on the street for us to go to this all you can drink bar for a good price and then he led us into this creepy old lift. We had this brief flash of "OMG, what are we doing? Are we Makino or something and will end up ransomed or something stupid", but it was okay in the end because it was this awesome bar with "modern, private Japanese booths" where you sit in these pits and they bring you sake and yummy foods like edamame and stuff. Our booth was right next to the window, so we could look out onto the street and see late night displays of skinship, like boys trying to kiss each other. This is the view from our modern, private Japanese booth.
Anyway, we made sort-of conversation with the two guys for a while, having sketchy Japanese and them not really knowing English, but it was fun anyway. Then they had to go and catch the last train, and they kept saying how they were so happy to have met us and they'd had so much fun, even though I didn't think we were particularly fun. They were so sweet!!
We didn't get lost on the way back to our hotel, you know why??? We had Chinen to guide us!
On Saturday we went to the Salt & Tobacco Museum, because it was supposed to only be 100 yen. It was 300 though and kind of boring. Then we did a bit of shopping and just hung around Shibuya for the afternoon. Because Shibuya is awesome. We were constantly amused by Oguri Shun appearing everywhere, especially the Walkie Walkie ad, where he has a bad perm and is way too hyper, like he's in Wham or something.
We also spent a lot of time in Excelsior coffee, because it was reasonably priced and had a good view out the window. It was mostly full of girls who spent like 3 hours putting on their make-up, and old people napping. This is the view out the window, you probably can't tell, but it's just across from Shibuya 109.
Yay, NEWS! Idols on billboards will never got old for me!
Shibuya is seriously full of guys who look like Nino. It's the hair, I think. This was really awesome at first but all the constant thinking of "OMG, IS THAT NINO! NO, IT'S NOT BUT I THINK THAT GUY IS!!" makes your brain really tired after a while. Still, it's impossible not to look at them though. Because Nino is hot.
That night we went to Shinjuku. There was some Pocky thing on, and this girl gave us a giant inflatable Pocky.
It was really annoying. We kept trying to get rid of it and then people kept chasing after us all like "YOU FORGOT YOUR POCKY!!". But when we went for dinner we accidentally "forgot" it. Dinner was good, we had beers and watched the baseball.
Then we went to watch hosts try to pick up girls!! It was fun! We kind of wanted to go to a host club but we were very low on money at this stage. Also, their hair kind of frightens me. There was one hostess club that we were highly amused by though.
Plain City!! How awesome is that!!! XP We went to this bar and there were these people on a group date!! It was very interesting, they were very awkward with each other but then one of the girls and one of the guys started to hit it off, but the girl sitting on the other end seemed kind of annoyed about it. We really wanted to stick around and watch, but they'd been serving us straight shochu(?) and after about half a glass I felt sick!!
On the Sunday we slept in and then went shopping in Aoyama. Actually, this possibly happened the day before and the shopping in Shibuya was on the Sunday, but that's not terribly important. There were lots of fancy shops and I nearly expected to see somebody selling a half-poncho-half-vest. If I had've seen one, I would've bought it. Went to Kiddyland, which was awesome. I really wanted to buy a Yoshi plushie but I was really starting to worry about money at that point. So then we went to Ebisu. We were pretty much through our list of things to do at that point so we could finally take it a bit easy, but I really wanted to go to Ebisu Garden Place. We really didn't mean to go there on the Sunday afternoon, it just turned out that way.
For some reason this wasn't nearly as emotional or anything as going to Kisarazu, I don't know if I was just used to seeing things from dramas by that point or what, but it was still kind of cool. There were lots of couples there as well, as you would expect.
Then we went to Roppongi. Roppongi is an evil place, I'm pretty sure it's a hellmouth.
First of all we went to this bar where we were the only customers and the guy was doing all creative flippy things when he made cocktails. They gave us free bar snacks and that was awesome!! One guy did come in as we were about to leave and he told us "HAVE A NICE ROPPONGI!!". I'm pretty sure he was being ironical, because Roppongi, it's not nice!
We passed this Irish pub and went in because they were showing the cricket, which is kind of funny because at home we NEVER go to Irish pubs and we NEVER watch the cricket. They charged us 1000 yen for a local beer, so we ended up drinking Australian beer, because it was cheaper. We made 1 yen bets on which faux!rock band they would place next and my sister won with Nickelback. We got chatting to these Japanese businessmen over who'd won the baseball the day before, and then this British guy came and sat with us. He was a weird guy, he was telling us about how he is a reporter in Japan to report on the economic crisis, but I'm not sure if that's the truth or not. He was that kind of weird that you can't really put your finger on, you know?? Also, his weird was totally overshadowed by the weird that followed.
See, then we met Chuck. Chuck was a brain surgeon from Florida. I'm pretty sure when he said "brain surgeon" he meant that he hacks up people's brains. This is me with Chuck and the British guy.
Chuck is the one who is grinning like an insane person. He wanted to take my sister and I home together and when I told him we were sisters, he said "even better". And that was actually one of the less disturbing things to come out of his mouth. Chuck ended up leaving when we turned him down and then we went to this really seedy bar with the British guy. It was pretty horrible, we didn't stay there long. But too long at the same time.
The next day we got up bright and early to go to Harajuku! Well, not so much bright. Not really terribly early either, but we got there. We found the Johnny's shop fairly easily, there were signs at the station!
So, went and got our ticket. We had to go back at 2:30, so we decided to go back to the fake shops and kill some time there. This is me with our ticket!!
Bought some stuff, but at this point we were so poor and if we had've been smarter, we'd have saved our money for the official shop, but oh well. We did find this one really cool place that had all stuff from when Arashi/KAT-TUN/NEWS, etc were juniors and they had like Pikanchi figurines and a Pikanchi t-shirt and stuff, but it was all really expensive. Everywhere else just had the same sort of stuff though. But my sister is really regretting not buying the Oguri Shun pen. She got pwnd by little girls again who were trying to look at HSJ stuff on the other side of the rotatey stand to the Arashi stuff. And LOL, one little girl told her sister to stop looking at Arashi stuff because they were lame. Lots of nice older ladies were looking at Jun-kun stuff, that was sweet. One shop was upstairs and it was playing the Time concert outside, so we stood there and watched it through Yes? No? and Carnival Nights, but then the guy who owned the lingerie shop downstairs yelled at us to clear off and stop blocking his shop, so we ran away.
Anyway, so we went and joined the line to go to the Johnny's shop, which was kind of hilarious. All these girls were doing their hair and make-up in the line... I don't know why. There was this guy with a walkie-talkie who kept telling people where to stand in the line. We think maybe he was a Junior on probation or something. He was very particular about where people stood, though I guess it was a public area, so it makes sense. Everyone kept actually pointing at us and talking about us all confused-like. I think they don't realise that Arashi are creating a storm around the world.
Anyway, we finally got to go to the shop, which actually had less stuff than in Osaka. They were also sold out of Riida uchiwas, wtf??? This made me sad. I got some nice photos of the Beautiful Days PV and we both got pictures of that ad where Tackey is dressed up like a baron or something for some postal service, because Baron Von Tackey is the most amusing thing ever. I bought a book to put my pictures in, but later when I opened it I realised that's clearly not what it's for because the pictures won't fit!! I think it must be for concert tickets or something, which is a pain, but oh well. The line was insanely long, but that was okay, because it was fun to watch the other people and what they were looking at. Like the old ladies buying pictures of the Juniors and the little girls who were obsessed with Tokio.
On the way home, this old lady was laughing at our Johnny's bags and then she asked us who we liked and we told her Arashi and she was really happy because she loves Arashi too. Once again, Arashi were bringing the people together!!
Back in Shibuya, we took Baron Von Tackey for ramen.
He liked it.
Had a lovely nap and then woke up to have dinner and watch our shows, and finally our QUEST WAS FULFILLED!!
Yay, Pepsi Nex!!!
After Shukudai, because it was our last night in Tokyo, we went for a nice walk around Shibuya. It was pretty depressing because we really, really didn't want to leave. Really.
Got up the next day to go to Kyoto. Tried to be all perky and positive-thinking about how Kyoto would be stacks of fun, but was really terribly sad. But at least we got to go on the bullet train again!! We got awesome bento boxes to take on the train. Mine was Pokemon!!
I also got a yummy cake, that would've been the best dessert ever, only for the previously mentioned melon thingie.
It had berry stuff inside it. It was very good!! We also saw Mt Fuji from the window of the train.
It's a very symmetrical mountain.
Kyoto... it was pretty. We got to our hotel (our bags were so much lighter at this point, having dumped most of our clothes and all of the booze), and took our stuff to our room, then when we were going down in the lift, it stopped at one of the floors and in got our friend Colin!!! There were many rofls and he told us places to go. His directions were really bad, but he also gave us a handy map, so that was good.
We went to see geishas, but all these tourists were jumping in their faces to take pictures and we felt kind of bad for them, so we didn't really take pictures or anything. They were very elegant and so forth though. Then we went to this temple, mainly because it was there. It was orange, I'm sure it's probably famous and stuff.
Then we went for all you can eat shabu-shabu! Yum!!!
The best part about the shabu-shabu was that there was this couple across from us and we got to see the guy's LOVE CONFESSION!!! It was so cute!! He was kind of hot and she was really plain, which made it even sweeter, and he pulled out this ring and confessed and she cried!!! I almost cried too, it was so sweet!! The food was good too, but I ate too much and got a stomach ache.
We decided to get the subway back, because we'd walked really far, and the girl standing behind us at the platform looked exactly like Nishikido Ryo! I mean EXACTLY!! So we sneakily took a picture of her. Try to ignore how freaking insane I look in this picture and look at the girl behind me. Wow, I really look kind of nuts there though.
She's kind of turned away and it's a bad picture and she doesn't look much like him there, but honestly, she really looked so much like him. It amused us for the subway ride anyway. XP
The next day was our last day, so we went to Arashiyama. It was really pretty. We were so happy that we could finally read the Kanji of something!!
It wasn't a stormy mountain at all though. Mainly it was full of old people. A pretty mountain though, which you would expect.
Also, we bought more idol magazines. They didn't have Potato though, which I really wanted to get because it had a picture of Chinen dressed like a chicken in it, and it was the cutest thing ever. Maybe not like a chicken, but there were definitely feathers.
Then we had to leave. It was very sad. The plane ride home was okay, I mostly slept the whole way, but we had to stay at the Gold Coast for another 4 hours and I was pretty much depressed the whole way. D: This is our "after" picture.
sandyphoenix and madeye1200, I got postcards for you but I haven't sent them yet. But I will!!! Also, starfishdance and missmomoko, please be expecting something awesome in the mail next week. Or maybe the week after, I'm not sure when I get money next! <33333333
Anyway, so I'm home. I'm going to give up on trying to catch up with the past three or so weeks of my flist and just go from now, but if there's anything terribly important that I've missed, please tell me!!
I can't actually find my travel diary, so I'm going on memory here, which means I'll probably leave stuff out, but oh wells.
Our flight was horrible. We had to be at the airport at like 4.30am and I'd had my tooth out the day before, so I got hardly any sleep, and then our flight got delayed at the Gold Coast for like four hours. This is me at the Gold Coast. I am not happy. It was $6.50 for a chocolate milk. Oh!! I have chocolate milk in the fridge!!
Once we got to Osaka, we realised how much unnecessary stuff we'd packed. I actually had blisters on my hand from my suitcase. We ended up dumping most of our stuff later on, but then we bought so much JE merchandise that it was nearly as heavy coming back anyway, but it was a happy kind of heavy!! XP
Even though we were really tired when we got there, we wanted to have a look around, so we went out to get food. We were staying on Dotonburi, which was awesome. All the guys looked like idols!! Only gayer! But they were hitting on girls, so it made us reevaluate our assessment of Arashi's hetrosexuality. Or something. Anyway, we went and got ramen and it was awesome.
There were these three guys in the ramen place who had been on our plane and they were very friendly and nice and wanted to take pictures of us. They didn't look like idols, but they look much better than we do at that point!! XP
We didn't actually eat at the place with the giant mechanical crab, but we did get CRABS TO WEAR ON OUR HEADS anyway!! I am not actually drunk in this picture, despite looks.
We spent the next day looking for the Osaka Johnny's shop, but the directions we were given were dodgy, so we just walked around and looked at shops, mainly. We got hit on by these two school kids, they were really cute, but seriously, they were in their school uniforms!! A lot of the directions we were given to places from people's websites or whatever were really bad, I feel like maybe I should make some sort of post at some point about how not to be wandering around Japan like a dick looking for JE stuff or something. Anyway, for the first week or so we were there we got very excited every time we saw idols advertising stuff!! Here is the very first time we saw idols on a vending machine! And thus began our Epic Quest to find Jun-kun advertising Pepsi Nex!!
Everywhere we went there were huge NEWS HAPPY BATH DAY displays!! It was a time of happiness!!
Idol-advertised products are superior to other products!! I bought Jin-flavoured lip cream, which actually doesn't taste like incredibly hot manwhore at all, but more like strawberries!!! I love how they put the sticker over Junno's face!! ROFL.
But the happiest thing of all was CRUNKY!! We ate a lot of Crunky, but figured it's okay because it's endorsed by Kame and he's like the thinnest person ever!
Anyway, we found the Johnny's shop the next day and bought fans, yay!! The Osaka shop wasn't that busy, we just walked straight in, but the staff there were mighty unfriendly. We have this theory about how, like you know people who work in sweet shops are really sour? We think that people who work in the Johnny's shop have had all their sparkly sucked our or something. The girl yelled at me in her weird Kansai dialect because I didn't put my NEWS stuff on a seperate sheet to my Arashi stuff - so sorry
starfishdance, I didn't get you any awesome Yamapi stuff there. I really wanted to get an Ohno fan but they had sold out, so I got a Nino one instead, and then the girl yelled at me for calling Sho "Sho" instead of "Sakurai-kun".Then we took Sho and Nino to lunch!!
We were going to take them to the aquarium as well, but we thought they might get hurt, and Nino doesn't really like the sea, so we left them in our hotel room.
The aquarium was awesome!! We went on the huge ferris wheel first and then this guy talked us going into his ninja maze, which was basically just this maze thing where stuff jumped out at you or whatever. It was fun though, and I totally didn't react like Aiba in the haunted house. This is me on the ferris wheel.
I really loved the aquarium!! I loved the otters!
The whale sharks were very impressive. We have video!
There was this guy cleaning the windows and we accidentally took video of him too.
And the jellyfish were very hypnotic.
That night we watched Himitsu (the one where they got pwnd by the little girls at table tennis) and decided that it was better to drink our 4 litres of duty-free booze than to carry it. This was probably not a good plan, as we actually managed a whole litre of vodka and had to catch the bullet train to Tokyo the next day. But at least we had previously thought to get our Japanese teacher to teach us how to ask for painkillers for being hungover!! I was very proud of myself for remembering!
I have decided that when I grow up, I want to drive the bullet train! I love the bullet train so much!! They have this trolley girl with awesome food and she wears a nifty little uniform with a hat and gloves! <3333
Anyway, so I posted about it before, but we got to Tokyo in peak hour. It wasn't nearly as bad as I expected, seriously the trains run so often that they weren't that packed or anything, the worst part was our heavy bags. This is the point where my sister saw Kame but I didn't. She said he is taller than she expected and has amazing eyes, and all in all is much better-looking in RL. But still not the Best Jeanist in Japan. She now wishes she had've said to him, "stop shagging old women and beating up cab drivers and go play with the otters like a good boy", but oh well, sometimes you miss these opportunities in life.
Anyway, we somehow managed to get our bags from Tokyo station to Shimbashi and then we had to get the subway to Asakusa, and that is where the Stairs of Doom defeated us. These are the Stairs of Doom.
We decided to go sit down for a while and investigate the possibility of escalators or maybe even an elevator!! But nobody we asked had any idea. The old guy next to me and my bags said there wasn't any and we were going to offer him duty-free booze in exchange for carrying our bags, but we thought he might be offended. Also, we weren't sure how to say that in Japanese.
So, we decided to brave the stairs on our own and that's when the PRINCE appeared and carried our bags for us. The PRINCE was my favourite person we met in all of Japan, he was incredibly good-looking and chivalrous, and if they sold the PRINCE uchiwas, I surely would've bought one. <3333333
Anyway, we finally got to Asakusa, after a long and perilous journey. This is our room.
It was small. It was so small, there wasn't room for both our clothes and our uchiwas, so we had to combine the two!!
We decided to go eat but the girl at the place gave us weird directions and we got lost and wandered around Asakusa for like three hours. We ate good food and then met a friendly policeman who drew us a map. Anyway, we saw that famous giant lantern thingie.
Anyway, the next day was Saturday and we went to Kisarazu!! We weren't quite sure how to get there, but we figured if we just headed in the general Chiba direction we'd be fine and we were!! On the train we met this nice lady who kept getting her daughter to talk to us. The nice lady was born in Kisarazu and she loved Bussan!! <333 When we got off the train, she made her daughter ask us if we needed help finding anything, but all we really wanted at that point was coffee, so she told us where to get coffee and that was awesome.
After coffee we went to find the red bridge. I don't think Kisarazu gets many Westerners, or tourists at all, and everyone was looking at us like we were lost and this guy randomly took a photo of us. We were like minor celebrities or something!! Anyway, so decided to go find the red bridge but first we found this supermarket and guess what we found there???!?!! INCREDIBLY OVERPRICED FRUIT!!
That made us happy!! Anyway, then we found the bridge.
We walked over the bridge and it was kind of emotional. I don't know why. Possibly I was just overtired. Well, my sister says it's because we were "walking in the footsteps of Sakurai Sho", but that seems kind of lame. I think I was just so happy to be where I was right then, you know? Anyway, everyone had signed their names on the bridge, so we did too and then we headed back into the town. My sister took like 1000 pictures of raccoon dogs, but I would feel bad posting a couple and not all of them, so I won't post any, but if you're really interested you can see them all in my sister's facebook folder thinger.
Anyway, we were wandering around and came across this little junk shop place, and because it had a Cat's Eye poster in the window, we went to take a look. This little old guy ran it and he was sitting in his chair smoking and watching the baseball, he was the cutest old person ever. He had all this stuff in his shop from the show, like the t-shirts with like Bambi and Bussan on the back and their baseball numbers, so I asked him how much they were but they weren't for sale. Then we had a look around and noticed all this other stuff he had, like these photo boards of him getting drunk with the cast and this huge board thing they'd all signed. This is the huge board thing.
I also got very emotional when I saw Okada Junichi had written "Bussan will never die". Ah, I really loved those cats though!! The old guy also had the actual Ozi statue from the show!!
He was selling some other stuff, so we bought it, like YASSAI MOSSAI t-shirts and stuff. He gave us a heap of free stuff too, he was so sweet!!! Then we went and had coffee at this place that was playing weird cover versions of like Kylie Minogue songs and stuff and they charged us 1000 YEN EACH FOR A TINY LITTLE COFFEE!! That was the only un-awesome thing about Kisarazu though.
We also had awesome ramen there. The ramen guy was also very sweet and took a picture of us.
The next day we went to Harajuku and looked at the fake idol shops, but decided to come back when it was less busy to buy stuff, as we were getting totally pwnd by little girls when we tried to look at stuff. One girl who was like six years old told me that she wouldn't lose to me, and you know what? She was right. Then we went to Yoyogi Park. It was full of cute kids in kimono.
We wandered around and saw the Meiji shrine and whatnot, and then stumbled onto this agricultural market thing. They had lots of free food samples, awesome miso and cakes and so forth. The people on the stalls were all so nice!! This guy talked to us for like half an hour in Japanese about regrowth forests, and we surprisingly understood him!! He really talked forever though. But the most awesome thing about the market???
That's right, it's a BOAT MADE OUT OF VEGETABLES!! I'm pretty sure Arashi are going to try to sail it to Rainbow Bridge at some point in the near future! XD
That night we went to Shibuya, because we were staying at a hotel there the next weekend and had to change our reservation, but we couldn't find the hotel, due to more bad directions. That was okay though, because what we did find was the MR KEIO CONTEST!!!
I was going for the guy on this end, but I have no idea who won. It was actually just a part of the Miss Keio contest, which was also awesome, as they were giving out these gift bags with awesome cosmetics and things in them. You know what else is awesome? Pachinko! And more awesome than that even is STAR WARS PACHINKO!! Here is the truck advertising it!
Shibuya is the greatest place on the planet, but more on that later.
We were going to go to the sushi train near Asakusa station on the way home, but it was surrounded by police and fire trucks and A HAZMAT VAN!! We decided maybe we should give it a miss and had curry rice instead. We never actually got around to having sushi at all after that.
So, the next day was Culture Day and there was a parade in Asakusa with everyone dressed up in traditional costumes and whatnot.
It was pretty awesome, but the camera died right near the start. We were sitting near this nice lady and her family who decided to take care of us and make sure we were warm enough and could see and what not. People in Japan are so lovely!! It got really freezing halfway through, so we went and sat in this coffee shop and watched the rest out of the upstairs windows. People did dances and these samurai guys had a sword fight and stuff.
Went to Akihabara and bought new headphones. They are awesome. Also saw cosplayers, yay!!!
I had this amazing Hayashi Rice for dinner. I think it's like the one meal we don't have a picture of, but it really was super-awesome. XDDDD
Then we met up with
exdream1999 for karaoke!! She is so sweet!! We sang Arashi and SMAP and also classic rock and we ate marine-flavoured icecream. I was very amazed at her awesome rapping skillz! The background video things told this Epic Tale of the Forbidden Love of these two guys who were possibly hosts!! It was awesome! She had to go and catch her train, but then we got to talking about Arashi and whatnot for ages, I hope she didn't miss the train!! <3333Went back to our hotel/backpackers. Because we didn't have a TV in our room we had to go to the common room/bar place because we wanted to watch News Zero/Shukudai, but there were people playing the Wii. D: Luckily they were pretty drunk and the nice American girl convinced them to let us watch our stories. There was this sweet guy working behind the bar called Nobu-kun, who loved Yamapi and he was really amused by our reactions at the TV. Had a conversation with this Australian girl about whether or not Sho had a blemish on his cheek. It was a bit surreal.
We had to change hotels the next day and go to Ikebukuro, and we didn't want to carry more booze, so we gave some to the nice girl who let us watch the TV. She was very happy.
This is Ikebukuro West Gate Park. There isn't actually a statue of The King there. Or anyone who looked like Naguse/Yamapi. Or even gang members!! It was mostly old drunk guys.
Went to Ueno Zoo, mostly because I wanted to get one of those hand puppet things like Domyouji got for Makino, but it was closed.
Heard this old lady talking about Domyouji though, so that kind of made up for it. XP We looked around Ueno for a bit and then... I can't really remember but I think we went back to the hotel for naps. And later on we walked around the east side of Ikebukuro, which was much less seedy than our side. That was a pretty disappointing day, actually.
Wednesday we got up early because my sister wanted to run around the Imperial Palace.
Then we went back to Ikebukuro and had coffee. The coffee girl was sweet and made a bunny on my coffee.
That was the day we decided to go to the Aiba Family Restaurant, only we didn't really check up about it, so after getting there and finally finding it after bad directions, we found it was closed!!! Oops!! So we went to Shibuya so we could get the new Arashi single from Tower Records. They had a nifty little display where you could watch the Beautiful Days PV!! I totally didn't go crazy and spend all my money on magazines and CDs and DVDs or anything. Well, maybe a little, but that's okay, right??? On the way back on the train, we were looking through the Arashi photobook my sister bought and the old guy sitting next to her was reading over her shoulder! It was so funny, we think he really loved Matsujun.
I always wondered if people in Japan really got swindled all the time, or if it was just a convenient plotline for dramas, but then we realised it must be a problem, because there are ANTI-SWINDLING signs up!! DON'T GET SWINDLED AT THE ATM!!
Went back to Ikebukuro and went to Otome Road, only we were a bit tired and stuff by that point, so we didn't stick around long. We went to this place that was supposed to be a Gyoza Stadium, only it was like this stupid amusement place where you had to pay to get in and then you got ripped off by exotic-sounding but ordinary-tasting gyoza at all these stalls. We decided we didn't really like staying in Ikebukuro all that much, as it was seedy and nearly everything had gone wrong while we were there. There was one awesome thing about it though!!
On the Thursday we decided to catch the ferry to Odaiba. My sister is obsessed with Rainbow Bridge and took like 1000 photos of it. This is one.
Odaiba... I thought it was a bit lame. I think it's for couples. Everything was like about having your first kiss, which amused me because of that D no Arashi episode where they stalk the couple who are about to have their first kiss. Seriously though, there were even jewellery shops that sold stuff "for the anniversary of your first kiss". We went to the Fuji TV studio and all these school kids were hanging around where the people come out, so we joined the crowd for shits and giggles. We asked this couple who they were waiting for, but they didn't understand English or Japanese. Anyway, this guy came out and got in a car and everyone went crazy, so we went crazy too, even though we had no idea who he was. We later found out he was from that band "Breakerz" or something. It was funny, anyway.
Then we looked around the TV studio. There was lots of SMAP and Tokio stuff everywhere but only one little picture of Arashi. I felt kind of offended. We really wanted to ask where they kept the Falling Pipe Catch stuff but we thought they'd think we were weird. Seriously, though. If I were running that place I'd set it up so you could actually do the Falling Pipe Catch and Rolling Coin Tower. That's what the people want!!! We went up to this big round observation deck thing, because the ferris wheel looked too windy, and we looked at stuff. There was this thing where you could get a video of you being a newscaster, but we didn't do it.
The ferris wheel looked really pretty at night.
So did Rainbow Bridge.
We caught the monorail back, but we got on it THE WRONG WAY! I thought monorails only went one day! You know, mono meaning one, rail meaning rail!
We decided to go to Ginza and get us some high class cuisine, but there was some sort of emergency at Shimbashi station so we didn't want to catch the subway.
We decided to walk to Ginza and got pretty much lost. At least it wasn't bad directions this time, but our own bad sense of direction. Anyway, we got there and decided to go to the Sony Building, because it was open for like another 12 minutes. The Sony Building... well I didn't see much of it, on account of they were playing this camera ad on a loop with Okada Junichi and he looked really hot, so we spent the 12 minutes looking at that. They actually had to kick us out, I think. I should download that ad.
Ginza is really quiet.
We went to this little sake bar, and the waiter recommended a heap of stuff for us. No idea what some of it was but it was really awesome!!
You know what I really loved about Japan? The trains! They are punctual and you can't talk on your phone and it is nice and convenient for naps!! People nap on the train all the time and don't even miss their stop! Sometimes they get off at their stop while they're still asleep!! Sometimes we just went and caught the train for the heck of it. It was nice. Comforting.
At our hotel in Ikebukuro, you had to watch the TV in the downstairs cafe, so the girl put on Himitsu for us. She was really happy because she loves Sho, so she kept bussing the tables in our area, even though there were no other customers. XP Arashi really brings the people together!!!
That night was kind of awful because we'd had to change from our twin room to a double, so my sister and I had to share a bed. I ended up sleeping on the floor, it was much more comfortable!!
The next day we moved from that hotel to our hotel in Shibuya. It was such a beautiful hotel! We had seperate rooms!!!!!
And the cafe downstairs made this awesome French Toast. It was just... awesome.
Anyway, so we decided to go to the Aiba Family Restaurant again and this time it was open!! There was this huge line of girls waiting to go in, so we joined the line and wrote our names on this list and watched all the people eating delicious food inside. OMG, we were so hungry!! The girls in the line kept looking at us like we were lost, but they were friendly enough anyway. So, a few people left and we got to sit in the waiting area. I'm sure anybody who cares has seen pictures of it anyway, which is good because I did take some pictures but I CAN'T FIND THEM!! It was mainly just autographs of the members - there was one from Nino dated on Aiba's birthday a few years ago, which I thought was sweet. And also a huge drawing of Aiba that somebody had done. They have this book there so that you can write a message to Aiba, and we wrote stuff, basically "thank you for being the most awesome person ever". I tried to draw a happy little rainbow, but it came out looking like... I don't even know what. A splodge? My sister said Aiba will know what it is, on account of being in a band with Sho though.
Anyway, then we met Aiba's mother. She's so lovely!! She looks just like him, only shorter and more like a woman. She was really dignified, I was really impressed by her. It seemed like even though the place was full of fangirls, she was kind of above it somehow, but not in a snooty way or anything. It's hard to explain. Anyway, then we got seated and at that point we were kind of more worried about food than anything else. THE FOOD WAS SO AWESOME OMG!
This is our second plate of gyoza, it was so awesome we couldn't stop eating before this to take a picture.
And I had this awesome frozen melon dessert thing, I swear it is the best thing I've eaten in my life.
We really wanted to come back every day after that for lunch, but we thought we'd look like crazy stalkers, instead of just food-obsessed piggies!! All around the restaurant were pictures that Aiba's brother had taken, they were really amazing pictures. It kind of made me really happy that both brothers had an equal representation there. When we left, my sister dropped her wallet that had like 70000 yen in it, and the girls who had been in the line with us ran after us to give it to her! So nice!! Once again, Arashi is the symbol of goodness in the world, or something!! XD
That night we decided to go out in Shibuya, as we hadn't really seen any nightlife at all. There were these guys outside the station giving away FREE HUGS!!! This is the worst picture of me ever, but this guy really did give great hugs.
Spent ages wandering around but everywhere was food places and we were still stuffed from lunch! We ended up going to this soccer bar because we couldn't find anywhere else. They had cheap cocktails and the bar girl told us we looked really glamorous, like we were "from Sex & the City: the Movie"!! I'm not sure if that's a compliment or not, or if there's any difference between the movie and the TV show, but I chose to be flattered anyway.
We left there because it was boring and tried to find another bar, so we ended up going into this ramen place, but they were about to close, so we asked these two guys sitting near us where a bar was. One of the guys, we call him "Blonde Guy", jumped up and told us to come with him and took off down the street. He showed us this Irish bar or something but we said we wanted a Japanese one, so he told us to hang on and went back to his friend and finished his beer and paid and dragged his friend out and set off on a Quest To Find A Bar! He negotiated with this guy on the street for us to go to this all you can drink bar for a good price and then he led us into this creepy old lift. We had this brief flash of "OMG, what are we doing? Are we Makino or something and will end up ransomed or something stupid", but it was okay in the end because it was this awesome bar with "modern, private Japanese booths" where you sit in these pits and they bring you sake and yummy foods like edamame and stuff. Our booth was right next to the window, so we could look out onto the street and see late night displays of skinship, like boys trying to kiss each other. This is the view from our modern, private Japanese booth.
Anyway, we made sort-of conversation with the two guys for a while, having sketchy Japanese and them not really knowing English, but it was fun anyway. Then they had to go and catch the last train, and they kept saying how they were so happy to have met us and they'd had so much fun, even though I didn't think we were particularly fun. They were so sweet!!
We didn't get lost on the way back to our hotel, you know why??? We had Chinen to guide us!
On Saturday we went to the Salt & Tobacco Museum, because it was supposed to only be 100 yen. It was 300 though and kind of boring. Then we did a bit of shopping and just hung around Shibuya for the afternoon. Because Shibuya is awesome. We were constantly amused by Oguri Shun appearing everywhere, especially the Walkie Walkie ad, where he has a bad perm and is way too hyper, like he's in Wham or something.
We also spent a lot of time in Excelsior coffee, because it was reasonably priced and had a good view out the window. It was mostly full of girls who spent like 3 hours putting on their make-up, and old people napping. This is the view out the window, you probably can't tell, but it's just across from Shibuya 109.
Yay, NEWS! Idols on billboards will never got old for me!
Shibuya is seriously full of guys who look like Nino. It's the hair, I think. This was really awesome at first but all the constant thinking of "OMG, IS THAT NINO! NO, IT'S NOT BUT I THINK THAT GUY IS!!" makes your brain really tired after a while. Still, it's impossible not to look at them though. Because Nino is hot.
That night we went to Shinjuku. There was some Pocky thing on, and this girl gave us a giant inflatable Pocky.
It was really annoying. We kept trying to get rid of it and then people kept chasing after us all like "YOU FORGOT YOUR POCKY!!". But when we went for dinner we accidentally "forgot" it. Dinner was good, we had beers and watched the baseball.
Then we went to watch hosts try to pick up girls!! It was fun! We kind of wanted to go to a host club but we were very low on money at this stage. Also, their hair kind of frightens me. There was one hostess club that we were highly amused by though.
Plain City!! How awesome is that!!! XP We went to this bar and there were these people on a group date!! It was very interesting, they were very awkward with each other but then one of the girls and one of the guys started to hit it off, but the girl sitting on the other end seemed kind of annoyed about it. We really wanted to stick around and watch, but they'd been serving us straight shochu(?) and after about half a glass I felt sick!!
On the Sunday we slept in and then went shopping in Aoyama. Actually, this possibly happened the day before and the shopping in Shibuya was on the Sunday, but that's not terribly important. There were lots of fancy shops and I nearly expected to see somebody selling a half-poncho-half-vest. If I had've seen one, I would've bought it. Went to Kiddyland, which was awesome. I really wanted to buy a Yoshi plushie but I was really starting to worry about money at that point. So then we went to Ebisu. We were pretty much through our list of things to do at that point so we could finally take it a bit easy, but I really wanted to go to Ebisu Garden Place. We really didn't mean to go there on the Sunday afternoon, it just turned out that way.
For some reason this wasn't nearly as emotional or anything as going to Kisarazu, I don't know if I was just used to seeing things from dramas by that point or what, but it was still kind of cool. There were lots of couples there as well, as you would expect.
Then we went to Roppongi. Roppongi is an evil place, I'm pretty sure it's a hellmouth.
First of all we went to this bar where we were the only customers and the guy was doing all creative flippy things when he made cocktails. They gave us free bar snacks and that was awesome!! One guy did come in as we were about to leave and he told us "HAVE A NICE ROPPONGI!!". I'm pretty sure he was being ironical, because Roppongi, it's not nice!
We passed this Irish pub and went in because they were showing the cricket, which is kind of funny because at home we NEVER go to Irish pubs and we NEVER watch the cricket. They charged us 1000 yen for a local beer, so we ended up drinking Australian beer, because it was cheaper. We made 1 yen bets on which faux!rock band they would place next and my sister won with Nickelback. We got chatting to these Japanese businessmen over who'd won the baseball the day before, and then this British guy came and sat with us. He was a weird guy, he was telling us about how he is a reporter in Japan to report on the economic crisis, but I'm not sure if that's the truth or not. He was that kind of weird that you can't really put your finger on, you know?? Also, his weird was totally overshadowed by the weird that followed.
See, then we met Chuck. Chuck was a brain surgeon from Florida. I'm pretty sure when he said "brain surgeon" he meant that he hacks up people's brains. This is me with Chuck and the British guy.
Chuck is the one who is grinning like an insane person. He wanted to take my sister and I home together and when I told him we were sisters, he said "even better". And that was actually one of the less disturbing things to come out of his mouth. Chuck ended up leaving when we turned him down and then we went to this really seedy bar with the British guy. It was pretty horrible, we didn't stay there long. But too long at the same time.
The next day we got up bright and early to go to Harajuku! Well, not so much bright. Not really terribly early either, but we got there. We found the Johnny's shop fairly easily, there were signs at the station!
So, went and got our ticket. We had to go back at 2:30, so we decided to go back to the fake shops and kill some time there. This is me with our ticket!!
Bought some stuff, but at this point we were so poor and if we had've been smarter, we'd have saved our money for the official shop, but oh well. We did find this one really cool place that had all stuff from when Arashi/KAT-TUN/NEWS, etc were juniors and they had like Pikanchi figurines and a Pikanchi t-shirt and stuff, but it was all really expensive. Everywhere else just had the same sort of stuff though. But my sister is really regretting not buying the Oguri Shun pen. She got pwnd by little girls again who were trying to look at HSJ stuff on the other side of the rotatey stand to the Arashi stuff. And LOL, one little girl told her sister to stop looking at Arashi stuff because they were lame. Lots of nice older ladies were looking at Jun-kun stuff, that was sweet. One shop was upstairs and it was playing the Time concert outside, so we stood there and watched it through Yes? No? and Carnival Nights, but then the guy who owned the lingerie shop downstairs yelled at us to clear off and stop blocking his shop, so we ran away.
Anyway, so we went and joined the line to go to the Johnny's shop, which was kind of hilarious. All these girls were doing their hair and make-up in the line... I don't know why. There was this guy with a walkie-talkie who kept telling people where to stand in the line. We think maybe he was a Junior on probation or something. He was very particular about where people stood, though I guess it was a public area, so it makes sense. Everyone kept actually pointing at us and talking about us all confused-like. I think they don't realise that Arashi are creating a storm around the world.
Anyway, we finally got to go to the shop, which actually had less stuff than in Osaka. They were also sold out of Riida uchiwas, wtf??? This made me sad. I got some nice photos of the Beautiful Days PV and we both got pictures of that ad where Tackey is dressed up like a baron or something for some postal service, because Baron Von Tackey is the most amusing thing ever. I bought a book to put my pictures in, but later when I opened it I realised that's clearly not what it's for because the pictures won't fit!! I think it must be for concert tickets or something, which is a pain, but oh well. The line was insanely long, but that was okay, because it was fun to watch the other people and what they were looking at. Like the old ladies buying pictures of the Juniors and the little girls who were obsessed with Tokio.
On the way home, this old lady was laughing at our Johnny's bags and then she asked us who we liked and we told her Arashi and she was really happy because she loves Arashi too. Once again, Arashi were bringing the people together!!
Back in Shibuya, we took Baron Von Tackey for ramen.
He liked it.
Had a lovely nap and then woke up to have dinner and watch our shows, and finally our QUEST WAS FULFILLED!!
Yay, Pepsi Nex!!!
After Shukudai, because it was our last night in Tokyo, we went for a nice walk around Shibuya. It was pretty depressing because we really, really didn't want to leave. Really.
Got up the next day to go to Kyoto. Tried to be all perky and positive-thinking about how Kyoto would be stacks of fun, but was really terribly sad. But at least we got to go on the bullet train again!! We got awesome bento boxes to take on the train. Mine was Pokemon!!
I also got a yummy cake, that would've been the best dessert ever, only for the previously mentioned melon thingie.
It had berry stuff inside it. It was very good!! We also saw Mt Fuji from the window of the train.
It's a very symmetrical mountain.
Kyoto... it was pretty. We got to our hotel (our bags were so much lighter at this point, having dumped most of our clothes and all of the booze), and took our stuff to our room, then when we were going down in the lift, it stopped at one of the floors and in got our friend Colin!!! There were many rofls and he told us places to go. His directions were really bad, but he also gave us a handy map, so that was good.
We went to see geishas, but all these tourists were jumping in their faces to take pictures and we felt kind of bad for them, so we didn't really take pictures or anything. They were very elegant and so forth though. Then we went to this temple, mainly because it was there. It was orange, I'm sure it's probably famous and stuff.
Then we went for all you can eat shabu-shabu! Yum!!!
The best part about the shabu-shabu was that there was this couple across from us and we got to see the guy's LOVE CONFESSION!!! It was so cute!! He was kind of hot and she was really plain, which made it even sweeter, and he pulled out this ring and confessed and she cried!!! I almost cried too, it was so sweet!! The food was good too, but I ate too much and got a stomach ache.
We decided to get the subway back, because we'd walked really far, and the girl standing behind us at the platform looked exactly like Nishikido Ryo! I mean EXACTLY!! So we sneakily took a picture of her. Try to ignore how freaking insane I look in this picture and look at the girl behind me. Wow, I really look kind of nuts there though.
She's kind of turned away and it's a bad picture and she doesn't look much like him there, but honestly, she really looked so much like him. It amused us for the subway ride anyway. XP
The next day was our last day, so we went to Arashiyama. It was really pretty. We were so happy that we could finally read the Kanji of something!!
It wasn't a stormy mountain at all though. Mainly it was full of old people. A pretty mountain though, which you would expect.
Also, we bought more idol magazines. They didn't have Potato though, which I really wanted to get because it had a picture of Chinen dressed like a chicken in it, and it was the cutest thing ever. Maybe not like a chicken, but there were definitely feathers.
Then we had to leave. It was very sad. The plane ride home was okay, I mostly slept the whole way, but we had to stay at the Gold Coast for another 4 hours and I was pretty much depressed the whole way. D: This is our "after" picture.
sandyphoenix and madeye1200, I got postcards for you but I haven't sent them yet. But I will!!! Also, starfishdance and missmomoko, please be expecting something awesome in the mail next week. Or maybe the week after, I'm not sure when I get money next! <33333333Anyway, so I'm home. I'm going to give up on trying to catch up with the past three or so weeks of my flist and just go from now, but if there's anything terribly important that I've missed, please tell me!!
