After three days of sitting at my desk with nothing to do, I was off again. This time I was headed to Tokyo. There was a big electronic music festival called Electrox. I am not huge into electronic music, but I knew one band who was playing, Krewella, and had heard of two others, Diplo and Don Diablo. I love Krewella so much, They're great! I ultimately bought the ticket for them, but I was excited to hear some new people as well.
I arrived in Tokyo the evening of the 6th, and hung out with some friends. We went shopping to a few places in Harajuku, I only bought stuff at B-Side Lable cuz I can’t resist, and went out to eat and socialize.
The next morning (1/7/17) we woke up a little worse for wear and headed out of Tokyo to Chiba where the festival was being held.
It was full of people and the venue had three stages set up. The three stages were separated by walls and there were lots of decorations hanging from the ceiling for the laser lights to bounce off of. There were also television screens hanging from the ceiling in the biggest room so cool visuals could be shown while the music played.
We bounced from room to room while the different acts played; a few of them were pretty good. I really liked Shintaro, and Don Diablo. I thought Slushii was ok, and I heard parts of Mija, but I wish I had gotten to hear more (my friends had left to get food and I joined them.)
My friends were in line to get water when Krewella came on, and I left them to go rock out. Nothing was going to keep me from listening to Krewella and having a seizure on the dance floor! My friends said they’d catch up with me on the dance floor. They never showed up, but I didn’t mind too much. I was just having fun dancing. I danced with strangers and made friends. It was super fun! Only when Krewella’s act ended did my friends wander onto the dance floor. Turns out they had gotten hungry again and were outside eating and listening to Krewella from a distance.
Up next was Diplo. Now, I had heard a lot about Diplo, and I was excited to finally hear him. But, I was ultimately disappointed with his set. I wasn’t very interested in the music, and I didn't feel like it was all that great to dance to, either. All in all, I was not impressed with Diplo.
Diplo was the last act of the night, so after it ended we headed back to Tokyo. Big Mike was dying from the heat. He generates a lot more heat than your average person. He was walking outside shirtless, and the security guards told him to put his shirt back on and were keeping an eye on us to make sure he complied. I felt bad for him. He was so hot!
We went out to eat dinner, I had a tofu soup-thing. It was very good! After that we went to karaoke. I was sooooo tired by this point, it was nearly 2 am! It was the only time in my life that I wasn’t excited to go to karaoke. I would have left the group at this point, but my phone had 1% battery life and I couldn’t make it to the hotel alone. What I was able to do was talk them out of doing karaoke for 3-6 hours and do it for only 1.5 hours.
When we walked out of the karaoke place we saw some yakuza (?) roughing up a man. It was getting pretty scary so we notified a police station across the street. They intervened and helped the man.
After that we walked until we found a cab, and went back to the hotel. I was positively exhausted at this point. I was asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.
The next morning I didn’t have any energy for anything other than getting home. I made my way to a suburb of Tokyo where I left my car and then drove 6 hours back to Minamisoma. I didn’t take the expressway; instead I drove up along the pacific coast of Japan. It was really beautiful, and I drove through a lot of interesting towns. It was dark by the time I got to drive through Futaba and Namie. Those were the towns that were evacuated during the 2011 nuclear accident. They are still too dangerous to live in today, although you can drive through them on the major road. It was dark already and seeing the abandoned buildings was pretty creepy, and harrowing. I’d like to drive along that road during the day sometime soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment