Roppongi is mentioned to be a neighborhood were you actually can see brawls outside of pubs as compared to the rest of Tokyo which have extreme low crime-rate. It’s also where the clubs are open all night and some kind of red light district which you quickly tell by the signs and names of clubs. We found and S/M store but unfortunately it was closed, we might check it out later. I am interested in what the japanese mind can add to that genre of clothing and toys. We walked away from the clubs, checked out some posh interior design shops and have been walking in some parks for awhile. We saw on a map that there was supposed to be a university here as well so we plan to check that out now.

The university eluded us but we checked out more parks, were walking around Tokyo Tower which really isn’t much compared to other buildings we’ve seen so far. We had dinner at a middle cast indian restaurant which were OK but nothing more. We still haven’t figured if we should go out clubbing tonight but the thought of being tired/hung over and no secured place for the night doesn’t sound that nice. We’ll see, we have confirmed stay on sun/monday so saturday might be the day for Womb.

Yep, it’s doable and you get the same hangover as in every other country. We just had to verify this though. We went out for food around 21 after showering and enjoying our own room. We had to do some exercising as well and I guess we looked pretty gay if someone would have entered the room when we were doing pushups and crunches. At least we drunk some local liquor between the sets. Anyways, we went to the place we ate at the very first day in Tokyo. A very small bar/teriyaki place with nice background music.

We practiced our japanese with the very nice looking girl and her english-speaking male colleague. We ordered some Shochu Roku (some 25%-ish stuff on the rocks) and since we are so nice and good looking we got the attention of the other visitors in the bar. They asked with the help of the bartender who could a little english where we were from and then mentioned IKEA, Volvo, SAAB and that we were quite good on soccer (?). Some laughs and more shochu later we realized that the curfew was soon active on our hotel. The music was really good (Ministry of Sound or similar) and I was a bit surprised when I heard Tomas Andessons’s ‘Washing Up’ remixed by Tiga through the speakers. And the girl was handling the music, we just had to ask her for for clubs and to write them down (Kaite Kudasai is a very handy phrase). She was happy to help us and we think that she was flirting with us, but it might been the shochu 😉 We got a few tips in different areas and are going to check out at least Womb (which a friend who lived here also recommended) in Shinjuku this weekend. After leaving the bar we decided that we needed a tiny sip of shochu before we went to bed.

So we bought a bottle of shochu in a convenient store (which by the way is named Sunkus) and we also found the wonderful party soft drink called ‘deeppresso’. Back at the youth hostel we teamed up with Eric, our dutch friend who we shared the room with. He brought some beers and we started the discussions of how to solve the world. Also the topics private property, japanese ways of handling unemployment (will elaborate this later together with a section discussing their toilets) were undertaken. Eric was to see some fish marked 6 pm but we just laughed at the idea of going there since we were more or less pissed and the clock was 3 pm. We woke up at the time for checking out and had to make a hasty retreat.

After breakfast at our current favorite place (rice and some kind of meat for 320 yen) we headed off to Tokyo station. We had no goal in particular so we strolled the station for awhile and then going out heading for some imperial palace. Outside we realized these parts of Tokyo differed from what we have seen before. The signs in neon and other signs had greatly diminished and were replaced by skyscrapers reaching for the sky. Names such as Rolex, Bloomberg and other financial corporations where printed on these buildings, we entered one that was some kind of conference center with restaurants on top floor and took the elevator up. The elevator was smooth like a criminal and the view was very impressive from the windows. It was nice although didn’t look particularly japanese, but could have been any major city. Afterwards we had lost track of the imperial palace directions but using our knowledge from medieval strategy games we headed towards some canals which could serve as a moat and found out that we were correct indeed. We haven’t seen the palace yet, it might be that this is only a park, but with only I say that we have spent an hour or two here now just sitting and enjoying the sounds, views and tranquility of this place. It’s almost bizarre with the soft breeze, trees and relaxed tempo and in the skyline less than 200 meters the skyscrapers starts to complement the view. I guess that these parks are necessary for the people working in these districts to stay sane.

Update: We found the palace or garden and strolled around reading signs and checking out some fountain park that was a part of the park. We realized that this park area was quite big and it actually matched the green big thing on all Tokyo maps.