Post About Japan #3 : Typhoon Chronicles

I am back once again with my last post about Japan! In a way, my six days (though it was really only six nights and five days) here have felt like so much more, and also like they haven't been nearly that long. Due to the typhoon, I ended up deciding not to head up to my Japanese home town up in Gunma. That ended up being a good decision, because the train lines ended up getting shut down completely, but I will get more into the typhoon a bit later. First I'll tell you all about how yesterday in Shimokitazawa went!



Shimokitazawa, as I think I may have said, is an area of Tokyo southwest of Shinjuku known for stage shows, unique fashion (and stores for such fashion, mostly second hand stores), and being a popular hang out for young people. I went there to meet up with one of my best Japanese friends, Erika! We haven't seen each other in around two years by now, so I was really excited to get to meet her. We had ended up setting our meeting time at 11:45... So, not wanting to be late, I headed out early, prepared to wait around fifteen minutes.

And then Erika was around 30 minutes late. So I spent around 45 minutes standing outside the station in on-and-off sprinkling rain waiting, as various people walked by and stared at me like 'Oh my, what is a foreigner doing here?'

When I told Erika I had been waiting for a while she apologized, and asked if I had come right on time. Not wanting her to feel bad for making me wait for quite so long, I said that I had and that I always come on time. Breaking out laughing she apologized even more and said, "I'm always late!" Laughing over that, we made our way to McDonalds for lunch where we talked and caught up a bit.

After McDonalds we went to a game center across and a bit down the road to take our first set of purikura. Purikura (short for 'print club'... basically sticker pictures) is like a photo booth on sugar, spice and everything nice. You pick backgrounds, brightness, and in some more recent machines how big it makes your eyes look... Because Japanese people seem to take that to heart. You also get to write and decorate them with the machine afterwards, putting on decorations and writing messages. Later on we ended up going to another game center and taking another set, so in the picture below here you can take a glance at them. At some point I'll get the actual picture files from Erika, and I'll make sure to show those off.

After that, I played a game of arcade-style Taiko no Tatsujin, a drum/rhythm game. I have the DS game, and it was nice to finally be able to play it in an arcade with an 'actual' drum again! We then walked down the main road from the station looking around for cheap, cute shops... which there were a ton of. I managed to go the whole afternoon and evening with only buying one one-piece dress/shirt and a cute wallet. Though in the end, I think it is meant to be a guys wallet, but it's cute anyway! The whole time, it seemed like everything that we found or I did, Erika wanted to take a picture of me... And each time she told me to 'kimete', basically to act cool/pose. Of course I had to answer to the requests.

As we were walking around and wandering, we came up on a really cheap karaoke place (it ended up being around $5 each for an hour and a half, including a drink) and had a ton of fun. Those of you who know me in real life know that I love karaoke, and we really got hyper as we sang everything from YUI to ONE OK ROCK and Kis-My-Ft2 to Girl's Generation. At the very beginning Erika managed to spill her milk tea on herself, but other than that it was a ton of fun. There aren't really any decent pictures that came out of karaoke, so here, have a derpface.

In the end we looked around both sides of the station (outside of the north and south exits) before heading back to the cafe attached to the second arcade we had gone to and taken purikura at. We both ate omurice, though I was extremely tempted to get a crepe instead. Now I'm glad, since I wasn't able to go to my favorite omurice shop back up in Maebashi. It was nowhere near as good as my favorite shop, but it was still really delicious.

After that we made our way back to the station, commenting on how there happened to be a lot of really good looking guys around. We parted ways, having to ride on different lines to get home, with a ton of awesome new memories. Some other things that went on during our hanging out... A group of Chinese tourists came up and asked us if we knew where a certain department store was in broken English. Neither of us having ever been to Shimokitazawa before, had to somehow explain that we didn't know. I felt really bad. I also got to explain the meaning of 'retail therapy' to Erika, after a shirt she'd spotted at a certain shop had already been bought by the time we headed back when she decided she wanted to buy it.

Today was the day I was supposed to take the train around two hours north to my (Japanese) home city of Maebashi to meet with another friend, Yumi. But with the typhoon coming, I spent all morning worrying whether or not it would be a good idea to head up. In the end I made the right choice to stay in Tokyo, because all of the train lines ended up shutting down (and are still severely delayed or stopped even now.) I also went to buy my express return ticket to the airport in the morning before the rain had started.

I have yet to get the pictures of the typhoon from my camera to my computer, but it was really amazing. I went out and bought my dinner and lunch at the same time from 7-11, pretty sure I wouldn't be able to head out around dinner time to buy something new. Even at 1:30pm the winds had gotten strong enough it was difficult to walk normally. Once again, I had made a good decision. By mid-afternoon it was as dark as early evening, with near 100 mile per hour winds and heavy rain. As far as I know, in my area there isn't much damage because it is higher up and pretty far inland. But closer to the ocean or in other prefectures, there are places where hundreds of thousands of people are now without power or are dealing with flooding and mudslides.

The lucky thing for me is that, although nearly all domestic flights this afternoon were cancelled, along with two international flights, the typhoon is going to be far enough north that I everything should be fine for the morning. They're even saying that it will be partially cloudy with some sun during the morning.

Because of the typhoon I was also unable to send my heavy, larger piece of luggage with the missing wheel to the airport ahead of me. So I will once again be kneeing it around and bruising up my knee, but hopefully it won't be nearly as bad because the elevators here at Minamisenju have been fixed and it won't be the middle of rush hour.

I will now leave you to go to sleep, because I have to wake up around 4am to be able to get to Minamisenju, head to Tokyo station, and get on my express train. Next time I post, it will be from Korea! I already know a few things I'm planning on doing for my first weekend there, some needed and some not quite so needed but extremely exciting anyway. Hopefully I will have some interesting stories for the blog pretty early on!