This week I’m in Tokyo. Right now I’m actually sitting in the Japanese NetApp office using a coworker’s PC to make a quick update. I think in the next two days or so I’ll be able to upload more pics, but until then…

For the last two days I’ve been staying with my cousin Eikichi. I love hanging out with him, but his place is a total bachelor pad: EXTREMELY small, like “one room to live, eat and sleep in”, and the bathroom has all sorts of funk growing in it. I was thinking of cleaning it up for him as a present for letting me stay with him, but after doing a little, I became afraid and decided to buy him dinner instead.

Two days ago…. wait, today’s Wednesday, right? Yeah, ok, after the Kawagoe festival I went to meet some old friends in Tokyo. After hanging out with them for a bit, I went out to dinner at a place called “GOHAN” (”FOOD”) with Eikichi. Surprisingly good. I teased the waitress because she brought out these “Loooooong Crab-cream eggrolls”, and I told her that “These are long, but not Loooooong”. This sparked a humerous debate between me, Eikichi and her. She apologized humorously and gave us $10 of free drink coupons to make up for our experience with the Not-so-Long Long Crab-cream Eggrolls.

Yesterday I just slept in, lounged, read books and played PS2 games almost all day long. At night, I went to Shinjuku to meet my buddies Cam and Mike for some food and drinks at our favorite spot, Butto-Trick, …. but when we got there, it was closed! Like, we even used the elevator to go to the floor it was on, but when the doors opened there were just a bunch of boxes laying around in what looked like a warehouse. Funny thing was that I checked the place out online last week, and there was no mention of a closing. Maybe they either moved or are rennovating. THe Butto-Trick bar’s disappearance, being the coolest place in Tokyo, was a huge shock. Total suckage.

So we went to yakiniku (”meat grille”) and then Starbucks. At Starbucks we were accosted by a Koren dude who started talking to us in great English right away about Jack Kerowack and Hemmingway and Dostoyevsky, and how modern authors sell out, etc. Weird experience: I didn’t shoo him away, rather we listened to his equivalent of an art school student rant about selling out and being successful. Turns out that for a number of reasons he was stuck in Japan, wandering the streets selling books of poetry and writing. He handed us his $10 pamphlet of Haiku… which, honestly? Sucked. We kept talking to him, and I swear I felt like I was high or something because I was going through the motions of a conversation that I cared absolutely nothing about. It was surreal. Luckily, Starbucks was closing soon and we managed to escape that Dinner Show with our lives, though Mike broke down and bought his Haiku book. IMO, if he was so obsessed with authors being recognized when they were dead, I was about to tell him to die quickly so that he would become recognized for his great works (hopefully other than his aforementioned Haiku). Oh well.

Today, Eikichi called in sick, so we’re going to go on a wandering spree of Tokyo, from Harajuku and Ebisu to Akihabara and Shinjuku. Maybe hit up some public baths. Until next time, then…