Six Gaijin

CHRIS: Getting to Gonpachi

Each time I've come to Tokyo, I've gone to Gonpachi for dinner.  Really fantastic food and a beef dish that is absolutely to die for!

Now each time I've come in the past, I've had someone else actually leading the charge through the subways and along Roppongi-Dori to get there but the directions were simple enough.  Leave the subway station and walk down hill. When you think you've gone too far, it is right there.  The key is leaving from the right exit.  Josh thought it was exit 3.  The directions said exit 2, but there was no exit 2 as far as we could tell so we left from exit 3.

Today, I learned that Roppongi-Dori goes down hill in both directions from the Roppongi station.  And everything looks pretty much the same whichever direction you walk, except that only one direction has Gonpachi.  Once we reached the bottom of the hill, I was pretty sure that it wasn't right so I asked someone at a Wolfgang Puck restaurant and sure enough, we had gone the wrong way and were now 15 minutes from the train station which is 15 minutes from Gonpachi. 

We trudged back up the hill, with everyone's feet already throbbing from a day or two of walking around Tokyo and eventually made it to Gonpachi.  The food was fantastic, as usual.  We didn't get to eat sushi since we were in the main dining area but we got a prix fixe meal that was great!

Oh, and the proper exit is 4b.

KATE: Day Two (*O*)

Sunday, March 30, 10:59 PM

omg, Harajuku was an intense experience. And tiring.

...Actually it was mostly just intense at the very beginning and very end, and kind of meh the rest of the time, but it was always tiring :3 But the beginning and the end were SO A MILLION TIMES WORTH IT

I'm dividing it into sections to keep me from ranting.

Getting there
All dressed up in our lolita, we headed over to the bridge where some massive amount of people wanted our picture. We stood there for probably 10 minutes, just having this crowd of people come up and take our picture. I guess we were cute.

Takeshita Dori
We searched a long time for Takuya Angel, but couldn't find it. In the end, we overestimated this street and it's shopping potential. Aside from the Closet Child and Gothic & Lolita, the only place we really bought anything was at the J-Rock stalls/tiny shops at the very beginning. There was a shop full of nothing but random J-Rock/Pop merchandise! Sandra and I got Arashi notepads :3 I also got some cool goggles and a belt for cheap.

Purikura
It's a whole adventure! After taking our pictures, we had to ask some poor Japanese VK cosplayer what to do next xDD She practically had to shove us into the next booth to get us to realize that you draw on the pictures in a different area from where you take them.

La Foret
First we went downstairs to the Like An Edison and bought alice nine., Gazette, and Bergerac singles. Then we went over to the Putumayo, where I tried on some pants, went to buy them...and realized my debit card had been shut down because no one had bothered to tell my bank I was going to be making large purchases in Japan. So Sandra's mom paid for them (I will be paying her back xD;) and we went to Angelic Pretty. But our feet hurt too bad, so we went to get burgers and then headed back for the train.

BUT THEN!
On the way back, we decided to make one last try for Takuya Angel. We walked down the last possible side road with a crepe stand at the corner (you'd be surprised at how many there are)...and saw the telltale Elvis statue! We hurried up the stairs to find the store...

and we walked in...and standing right in the entrance, grinning at us as we walked in, was DJ Sisen.

O__________O

If you don't know who this guy is, go google him or wikipedia or whatever RIGHT NOW. He is amazing amazing amazing and Sandra and I have been stalking him on the interwebs for weeks and weeks pouring over pictures of him. We love Sisen~~

So of course to see him just standing there like ":D hi" in Takuya Angel was like O_O AHGIHOIFSDGH

Sandra leans over and whispers, "...is that...?" and I was like "o____o yah" and she looks up at him and goes, "...Sisen...?" and he replies, ":D Hai"

At which point we erupted into volcanoes of fangirl. We were like ":DDDD can we get a picture?" and he was like, "Yeah!!" So we took pictures with him. HE'S SO CUTE OMGGG I don't even care that I'm ranting, every single detail is very important!! xD But when we held up the camera he'd suddenly just break out in this intense Sisen pose, and then while we'd be standing there waiting for the camera, he'd just randomly giggle and then have to re-pose because he'd been laughing. He laughed when I was standing there trying to fit my bags onto the tiny table so I could go take a picture. And he laughed whenever Sandra and I would pose, and he laughed when we'd switch spots (when I switched with Sandra, he went, "xDD CHANGE!") and he laughed when I moved Sandra so he was in the middle of our group picture. And then he reaches into his bag and goes, "Boku no...ah...my camera!" and pulls out HIS camera to take a picture with us. We were like ":DDD"

He looked at Sandra's My Melody purse and ring and said, "Ahh, Maimero!" and Sandra said she collected it and he said, "I like Kuromi :3"

Then we got him to sign some pieces of paper from Sandra's My Melody notebook (which amused him when she pulled it out), and decided to actually look around the (very very small) shop. For the record, the shop is like the size of a bedroom xD And packed with awesome Takuya Angel clothes. The whole time, he was totally hyper!! He was picking up things to show us, and laughing and asking questions like where we were from and being a dork (like putting a weird baseball cap with like...traffic cones on it on Sandra's mom). And when we were looking at the things on the shelf, he did a little dorky dance to the music that was playing xD he's so cute!!!

Then he rung us up (he asked if I wanted a black or pink bag, and I said pink and he laughed and said, "yappari...") and gave us stuff :D

It's a thing in Japanese stores (at least, the nice ones) that when someone buys something, the shop-person walks them to the front of the store, bows, thanks them, and gives them their stuff. Sisen gave us our stuff, then when he saw we were leaving, he was like "AH!" and ran out from behind the counter so he could walk us to the door! But we were the ones bowing and thanking him xD; Then he walked out of the store to watch us walk down the stairs, and he said, "Bye! Take care!" and we were like ">w< byeeee!"

Ah...I forget when xD but at some point, Sandra said "thank you," and he replied, "Welcome. *pause* ...to Japan."

He's so cute. I might die. But not until after I see Gazette on Wednesday.

Yahhhh :D

Dinner
We took the wrong exit out of the station, so it took us a ton of walking to get there on my already dead feet. Thought about Sisen and talked about him and ate some good tofu and really good beef and then some pudding :D Which was also really really good!

(ALSO for lunch I had green soda. Just FYI)

*passes out from exhaustion*

Saturday Afternoon

It's a beautiful day here, and the cherry blossoms are amazing. 

"I'd really like to go to Ueno Park," said Chris.  He'd been there before and knew it to be a place that had a lot of nice cherry trees and photo ops.  So off we went.  What he didn't know, nor did any of us, is that Ueno Park is possibly the most popular cherry blossom viewing site in all of Japan!  It was on this trip that we got our first taste of Tokyo crowds.  Holy smokes, was it ever crowded.  And while it was generally an orderly crowd...the old folks will shove you.  I'm not basing this on anything other than my own experience...and we certainly didn't get shoved all the time...but every time one of us has been shoved in a crowd it's been from an old person.  Not sure what that's all about, but it's a little disconcerting to say the least! 

So, even though Ueno Park was absolutely packed, it was still a really cool experience to have had because we really got a sense of what hanami is like.   Families, friends, and coworkers all stake out the best spots under trees and have big picnics  while viewing the delicate and ephemeral cherry blossoms.  The whole concept, of fleeting and fragile beauty, is somewhat bittersweet and strongly appeals to the Japanese aesthetic. 

OK, so there's your sociology lesson.  We also got to eat, eat, eat.

There were food stands all along the way.  Soup spots where all sorts of dumplings were waiting to be dunked in a bowl.  Giant ear of roasted corn.  (Really, the biggest I've ever seen, and I grew up in the American Midwest).  Deep-fried bundles of spaghetti, which were then fanned out and  sprinkled with powdered sugar.  And yakitori stations, where I pointed to the meat I wanted (some of which I wasn't sure what it was but I had faith that it would be yummy) and the man grilled it up and drizzled it in sauce before handing it to us on a paper tray.  I also bought a big thing of fried corn nuts, which tasted like the ones you can buy in America in convenience stores, but much fresher. 

After leaving Ueno Park with full stomachs, we headed to Shinjuku to do some shopping.  Sandra has been quite the expert in knowing where she wants to go to get what she needs.  You'd think she'd been here before, but she's just been doing a LOT of studying!  We headed to a store called Marui One , where they had floors and floors of Japanese brand.  Kate and Sandra, naturally, were in pure HEAVEN.  I actually got really excited for them, because they finally could go to a store where all of the clothes were just what they liked. These girls are hardcore Japanese fashionistas!

I'll let Kate tell you about the LMC concert they went to that night.  They really, really had a great time.