This weekend I picked up Cormac from Fukushima City and we drove down to a suburb of Tokyo, called Kashiwa, where we hopped on a train into Tokyo. We disembarked in Ueno station and walked over to Ueno Park where we met up with one of Cormac’s friends from Ireland, Darragh.
We had originally come to Ueno Park because a group of our friends had organized a hanami party in the park, but it looked like rain that day, so the hanami party was cancelled and changed to a house party in Shinjuku. It was many hours until we wanted to be at the house party, so we decided to tour Ueno and Tokyo for a while before heading to Shinjuku.
First thing we did is walk around Ueno park for a while looking at the cherry blossoms and checking out the various shrines and temples.
This street had a row of festival food vendors and tables where you could sit and eat.
This is Ueno Toushou-gu shrine. It enshrines the first Shogun of the Tokugawa Shogunate, Tokugawa Ieyasu. It is beautiful with its black and red wood and gold accents!
It had a field of stone lanterns out front, as well as an ema hanging display.
There was also a five-tiered pagoda that you could see though the trees, although we did not get a closer look.
After that we wandered over to a hill that had a Buddhist temple. This temple was unique in that it was small and shaped like this:
Inside the temple was a little room with a little altar that featured the Buddha. About twenty feet away was a large blue Buddha face. It was so unique! I’ve never seen anything like that before.
Ueno Park used to feature a very large Daibutsu in a seated position. It was damaged twice, once by an earthquake in 1631 and once by fire in 1841. But it was irreparably damaged in The 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake where the head fell off. After that they removed the face and displayed it on a small altar on the hill. The rest of the metal was melted down and used during the Pacific War of WWII.
Next to the Buddha face there was a woman singing and selling her album. She was talented and nice to listen to for the few minutes we were there.
From here we walked around for a short while longer looking at the Cherry blossoms.
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| Manhole cover in Ueno Park. |
But when we got out of the park we walked a few city blocks to Kappabashi-Doori. This is a street in Ueno that is famous for supplying restaurants with their cooking supplies as well as the fake food in window displays. It is also famous for having a golden Kappa statue on the street.
We walked onward and I asked shop owners where exactly the golden kappa statue was, they directed us over and over again “It’s about two more streets this way.” And “Oh yeah, you’re close, it’s about two more streets this way.” Lol. We eventually made it to the Golden Kappa.
There is the ground in front of the statue, it is a little kappa design!
We soon came upon a large Buddhist temple on a side street called Higashihonganji. It had a large courtyard and parking area, with many statues, signs and trees around.
We walked up to the entrance of the temple and saw a sign that said anyone was welcome to enter. We went in and sat down in the back near the doors and watched what we thought was a funeral. Monks were walking back and forth, and there were four people sitting in the front taking part in the ceremony. There was a monk chanting/singing and it was a beautiful sound. We sat in the back quiet as mice and watched for a few minutes before leaving. I was able to take a few minutes of video, you can hear the chanting in it.
As we walked along past all the restaurant supply stores I came upon one shop that was selling Jikatabi shoes! I have been looking for these for a long time! There is one shop in Minamisoma that has a sign out front that says they sell them, but every time I go into that shop there is nobody manning the store and nobody comes when you call out for assistance. I honestly wonder how such a store stays in business. I’ve thought more than once that they must have a camera and don’t want to come out and help the foreigner and just wait until I go away. But either way I found them in Tokyo! Not the same kind (I wanted taller ones that come up to about mid-calf) but these were close enough. They came in my size (children’s size 22.5) and they were about $40 cheaper than I had expected to find them, so win-win!
On the corner above a building is this large chef head showing the beginning of all the restaurant supply stores.
We walked back up the street, I wanted to buy a cellphone charm of some fake food. I had been here three and a half years ago, and I passed on buying a fake food charm. But I wanted to get one this time.
We found a couple of fake food stores and they were packed with people! I walked around for a few minutes in each one looking at what they had to offer, but I ultimately walked away empty handed. Three years ago I didn’t buy one because I thought they were too expensive. I expected them to still be expensive, but when push came to shove, it is too much for my blood. And now that I know this for sure, I am at peace with it.
We hopped on a train and went over to Shinkjuku where we met everyone for the party. There were about fifteen people there after we arrived, and it was great fun. Dancing and talking the night away.
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| Comfy chair in the lobby of the apartment complex. |
***If you don’t like asinine party stories, please skip to the next row of stars.***
There was this girl there, who nobody knew except the host (Maku). He went on a date with her the day before and didn’t like her, and couldn’t get rid of her because she was tenacious and he was too polite in his own Japanese way to tell her to get lost. So she stuck around and he tried to drop hints by hanging out with other girls.
Now before you feel bad for this girl, she was INSANE. And she looked like she rolled out of bed, put the dirtiest, rattiest clothes she could find on, and put more makeup over the already-too-many-layers of makeup already on her face. I learned later that this is exactly what she did. She looked like the trashiest girl you remember from college. Like, I’ve never met someone so socially retarded and self-absorbed at the same time. Take this crazy story-journey with me for a moment.
Her name is Kat and she works for Interac. Now, some background, Interac has a reputation for hiring just about anybody. So, if you get rejected for the JET Program, you can apply to Interac and have a reasonable shot of getting in. They hire second-rate people who just don’t make the cut for JET’s higher standards. In other words, they scrape the bottom of the barrel. That said, I’ve met plenty of Interac workers who were just fine, and I like most all that I have met. She was not one of these people.
I was talking with someone I had never met on the other side of the room, but finished my conersaton and came back to talk to Cormac and Darragh. Kat was there nearly shouting in Cormac’s face for being so rude. Cormac had dropped a joke that “Interac just hires the worst kind of people.” She was in the restroom and overheard him, so when she got out she decided to give him a piece of her mind. Now, if you know Cormac, you know that you can’t take anything he says seriously. He’s a huge joker and doesn’t have a malicious or prejudiced bone in his body. I know this, and tried to explain this to her, and Cormac even apologized. He told her that he didn’t really think bad things about Interac people and that he would make her a drink to mend bridges. But she was having none of it and she went the rest of the night bringing it back up over and over again. She was irrationally angry over this silly joke, she never let it go.
Now my friends (Maku, Olga and Felipe) had been hanging out with her for the last day and a half, and they said she refused to change clothes, shower or remove and reapply her makeup. Olga even offered her a makeup removing wipe which she turned down and instead layered more on her face. She also bitched about every little thing and was not a pleasant person to hang out with. She was also really, really jealous of Olga and spoke a lot of shit behind her back to me, because she was who Maku was hitting on in his attempt to make her take a hint and get lost. Ah, the indirect Japanese way.
If you think she doesn’t sound so bad, dear reader, just know that it gets better.
She told us all that in her application she applied to be a high school teacher, but that Interac had assigned her junior high and elementary schools. She then went on to say that this was probably a good thing because “High schoolers are sexy, and I cannot guarantee that I wouldn’t want to sleep with some of my high schools students.” I kid you not. She said this. In a room full of teachers. If she had any pity from me before, it evaporated. And its things like this that give Interac its reputation. They don’t spend enough time on the interview process, in my humble opinion.
She also told us that she has a cocaine habit, but since it doesn’t stay in your system for very long she was able to pass Interac’s drug test.
At one point she took Felipe’s hoodie and would not give it back. For some reason she liked me and would confess to me how much she hated everyone else at this party, but I was the only person who “understood her” and treated her like a person. I found this hilarious, because I was ripping on her as much as everyone else. But that aside, Felipe enlisted my help to get his hoodie back. I told her that I was interested in her dress underneath the hoodie and to take it off so I could see it. It was a long t-shirt that had been cut at the bottom to create fringe. So trashy. Once the hoodie was off I threw the hoodie on the ground behind me where Felipe was able to retrieve it.
And her catch phrase was “Oh, delete me!” Now it wasn’t so bad, but the farther along the night went, the more and more drunk she got the more she meant it. She started saying things like “Oh my god, just kill me now.” “Seriously, kill me.” “I don’t want to be alive anymore.” I realized that she is seriously depressed and definitely suicidal. At this point I started feeling a little bad for her.
At this point she started hitting on Darragh and asking if we could take her back to our hostel. We told her no, because the hostel was full and you could not share beds. The funny thing was that Darragh didn’t see that she was hitting on him, and even if he had noticed, he was not interested. You don’t stick your dick in crazy. She kept saying how she didn’t know how to book a hotel and how she was too poor to do so anyways. At this point I pulled up booking.com and tried to help her find a hotel or hostel at the last minute. Every suggestion was turned down because it was either too expensive, or too far away, or she didn’t want to take a train, or that taxis were too expensive. I realized that she was just trying to make us exasperated enough that we’d take her back with us because it would be less hassle. What she didn’t understand, but should have, is that I didn’t have to help her at all. I was only helping her because I thought it would get her out of the party sooner. So I gave up helping her look for a hotel and told her that I was sorry.
She then told me it was fine, because she had another way. She would go down to a bar nearby and pick up a guy and sleep with him for a place to sleep that night. She said she was used to this and did it often, which is why she didn’t know how to book a hotel.
I wished her luck in her quest and she was gone. She did come back about twenty minutes later, but I was dancing with friends to the music and pretended like I didn’t see her. She left for good after that.
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After we had our fill of dancing and socializing, Darragh, Cormac and I left the party so we could still make it to our hostel in time to check in. The boys were quite drunk (I was sober) so they didn’t want to go to bed, they wanted to continue having fun. After checking in and securing our luggage, we left again to go to karaoke across the street.
Darragh had never done karaoke before, so we thought it was the perfect time to introduce him to this magic!
After two hours of karaoke, the boys still wanted to stay out and have a sing song in the park. I was absolutely exhausted by this point, it was after 2 am, but I rallied and joined them. We sang in a small park for over an hour, mostly songs that I didn’t know from their corner of the world. They sang Scotland’s national anthem at one point.
Even after all this they still didn’t want to go to bed, but wanted to get something to eat instead. It was 4 am at this point and I was falling asleep at the table as they ate curry.
Only after their bellies were full did they agree that it was time to go back to the hostel and sleep. We didn’t get to fall asleep until nearly fie, and the staff kicked us out at 10 am. So we were exhausted the next day, but it was still an amazing night.
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