tōkyō : part one

After sadly leaving Natalie and Georgie on Sunday, I waited impatiently through the week to be reunited with them. At last on Thursday they sidled into Gifu. Seeing them in Gifu was really one of the strangest things I have experienced in Japan. My life here seems so separate and far away from my life in Australia, it nearly felt as though a meeting of the two should be impossible. However, it would appear it was not, and we had a lazy afternoon at university without my world self-imploding. That evening we went into Nagoya for dinner and a couple of drinks before jumping onto the night bus.

I’m a little sad I didn’t manage to get a picture of the night bus, as there was something hilarious about it, probably largely contributed to by the futuristic, pull-down shades to surround your face (whether for privacy or darkness, I know not). In any case, we slept about as well as one could expect on a night bus, and by the time we hopped off at Shinjuku station at 7:00am we were feeling a little weary, but ready for whatever Tokyo had to throw at us.

The first day we spent mostly wandering around just enjoying being in Tokyo. Unfortunately it was raining the whole day. Natalie was particularly disappointed as, having lost her umbrella she had to borrow an ugly one.

In the evening we met up with a couple of friends from Australia for karaoke. At Bec’s insistence, we tracked down the place in Shibuya where the karaoke scene from Lost in Translation was filmed. We sang some of the most peculiar songs I’ve ever done at karaoke.

After, we went moseyed over to Shinjuku for a drink before saying bye to Bec and Sam and heading home. Its always so nice to see familiar faces in strange places! I will put up the rest of Tokyo tomorrow; I put in my last report for the semester last night, and feel as though I used up all my best words in it, so I will wait until tomorrow to write an appropriately amazing post about the other two days.