Girls And Guns In The Land Of The Rising Sun

As I am heading to Korea soon I thought I should get all the pics up from my last international trip.

In that vein you will see something like a post spew in the next couple of days as I post a ton of pics. These here are from the fair city of Tokyo. My overall impression of Tokyo was a little negative but there were a lot of really interesting things. This post will try to focus on those.

One of the places we stopped by on our wanderings was Harajuku. This is a bridge made famous by randomly garbed people and Gwen Stefani. I am guessing that it was probably the birthplace of the term cos play which means dressing up in really complete costumes that look like either anime figures or babies of some sort. To me it was a lot like goth but slightly more original. The amount of time people must put into these costumes has to be huge. unfortunately when we showed up there was only a British kid dressed as a zombie. Not quite overwhelming.

However it did enable us to see this sign which had me smiling for the rest of the day.

After the Harajuku disappointment we decided to take a short jaunt across the city to see the one and only sumo arena in Tokyo. We looked at the tourist map and the subway map and determined that it should be about a 20 minute train ride. Unfortunately Tokyo is huge beyond born in Lansing Michigan concept of huge. It ended up taking us 90 minutes to get there and the longest we waited for a train was 5 minutes.

Fortunately when you got off the train you immediately knew you were at the right stop because of these awesome cut out photo things.

We knew we were on the right path because we kept seeing random sumo paraphernalia like these many sumo bobble head dolls.

When we finally got to the stadium though we were in for the biggest disappointment of the day. It was closed due to National Marine day. On top of being really annoying this left me wondering for the rest of the trip whether it was marine in the sense of people with blue suits and swords or marine in the sense of nautical. I have still never been able to find out which, it haunts me to this day.

We did get to take some nice pictures from outside the fence.



On the food front, there was a lot of good food. When we arrived Sander was a little under the weather and decided to get room service. The meal he got included a $14 orange juice which is pictured below. The whole meal cost around $30. This alerted us to the fact that Tokyo is on a whole different level of expensive.

Of course if you looked you could still find the occasional ghetto spot:

Walking around we found this place. If you look closely you will realize that every plate in that window is of a pork dish. Gots to love the swine.

The Japanese have also decided to one up the Americans in making it easier to drink beers. Making a full twisting motion to get the bottle cap off is too tiring. It should be as easy as opening a pop can.

Another trip that we decided to take was to the electronics district so Sander could find old Nintendo games because this one area was supposed to be the mecca for such things. On the subway over we found this sign which we could only determine meant that if you missed the train you would die. Hence the xx's in the eyes.

Once we got to the district we found that it had at one point been the place for video games. Now it was primarily shitty electronic components and porn. Oh they also had a lot of fake guns. Like in this picture, girls and guns:

On the way out of this district we had some fun with the cameras on the street. See if you can spot Marcelo.

And this did not actually take place in Tokyo but happened in Beijing before we got to Tokyo.

Me giving the large blow up doll some love: