ダニエルの冒険

Happy St Patrick’s Day to all. Today I had an Irish breakfast, made by Declan at the Zigzag. Of course, the sausages weren’t quite right, and he couldn’t get his hands on any black pudding or anything, but it was close enough I guess. I saw the parade at Harajuku yesterday too with Yukine, Yoshie, Hiroshi, and a few others. Lots of photos to upload soon!

The weekend started, as usual, with the Shinkansen. I went to Shin-yokohama and got the Yokohama line up to Machida where I was going to meet Yoshie and Asami. I arrived with the most part of an hour to spare so started wandering around the streets. It’s a really beautiful little area, and sort of reminded me of a street I walked in Paris before, with lots of small clothes shops crowding the edges of surprisingly clean little pedestrian streets. I was walking past some fruit stand or clothes shop or something that I wasn’t particularly interested in and saw “GAMES WORKSHOP” written up in big yellow letters down an alley. It’s the very same as the ones in Ireland, and I went in for a look. The inside was the same as you’d see at home, shelves packed with unpainted Warhammer 40,000 figures, a few painted Tyranids, Orc Killacans, Space Marine Dreadnoughts, Land Raiders, Predators, etc. There were three people in the shop: one employee and a young couple. They were standing around a table with lots of Tyranid and Space Marine figures, but just had a small squad each, and the employee was animatedly explaining the rules as they played. Space Marines won. I stayed a short while then went to the station to meet Yoshie.

We wandered around looking for a good restaurant and settled on an Okinawan restaurant in a department store. I found out that I’m not crazy about Okinawan food. Asami eventually turned up and the three of us went to Karaoke for a couple of hours. I tried some pretty ambitious songs, but they quickly got out of my range. Through the Fire and the Flames by DragonForce and 愛唄 (”ai-uta”, Love Song) by “GreeeeN!”.

Machida is pretty far from central Tokyo (that being the Yamanote-line in my mind), so I had no idea how to get back. I was to meet up with Yukine in the evening but couldn’t figure out where to go, so I just called Yukine, gave Yoshie the phone and asked her to sort it out for me. It turned out that I was going as far as Yoshie’s station anyway, then changing there onto some other line and eventually ending up at Yukine’s station. It took a while but in the end we found a restaurant that didn’t require us to wait an hour before we could get in the door. It was Italian but the food wasn’t very good and even though we got in fast, it took an age before the food actually arrived.

The following morning I met up with Hiroshi and his friend Brenda, who is actually British but has spent much more time in the Americas so you wouldn’t know it, and we ate Yakiniku at Harajuku while waiting for the parade to begin. Brenda wasn’t feeling very good because of the jet-lag and I left the two of them at the restaurant to go to the station meet Yukine. It took a lot of effort but we eventually found the parade, heading towards whatever seemed to be the most crowded street. It was fairly impressive, but the Irish were incredibly out-numbered by Americans, English and Australians. I was complaining a bit about the lack of Irish, but at the same time I was aware of how happy I am to be so rare in this country.

After the parade we found Yoshie, who had brought two friends from her university along with her: Aki and Emiko. See photos. We went to a nice restaurant at the top of Takeshita-dori near the station exit, Wolfgang Puck, and three of us had Loco-Moco, the Hawaiian burger-based dish. After we ate I got back on the train and to Shinjuku, parted with Yoshie, took the Chuo-ou rapid transit across to Tokyo, changed to the Shinkansen Hikari, changed at Toyohashi to the rapid transit back to Okazaki, and walked home. It sounds hectic, but I’m so used to the route right now that I don’t even have to look at the signs most of the time when going through these stations. I’m officially a Bullet Train Expert, I guess.

It was a great weekend, as expected, but not a whole lot of fantastic anecdotes to tell. This one is best left to the photos.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 9:13 am and is filed under Japan 2008. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.