day 59! shibuya, zushi

I had made plans for today, Saturday, to meet up with some of the TCK guys (Taiga, Tatsuya, Yuta, and Ayano) to go see fireworks in Zushi. :) Well, I say "plans" but really since it's these guys it was just a lot of expressing of interest, and then no concrete agenda for how that might come about. Usually Tatsuya's the one that gets the ball rolling but I guess this was just too last minute. To be fair though, a lot of the confusion was over whether or not the show would actually happen. When I saw the forecast, it had said there was an 80% chance of rain, and Tatsuya said that if it rained the show would be postponed til Sunday. So it was all up in the air, even the morning of, whether it would happen or not.


Actually I had invited Chris to come along, and to bring Asami as well, but since our plans were shaky and last minute, and Asami said she didn't want to watch fireworks in the rain and it would be too expensive to go with a risk of it being cancelled, so the two of them didn't come. :(

In the end we decided the morning of, to meet up in Shibuya at around 1pm and head to Zushi together.

Another meeting in front of Hachiko. There are some cute baa-chan's meeting there too, Shibuya isn't just full of young hipsters. :)

I was running a bit late (typical...) but Ayano has to come all the way from Chiba so she's usually at the tail end of the procession. We got a message from her saying she was at Hachiko, but couldn't spot us, so I went to find her. I spotted her sitting off to the side, and ran up to her and was like "oh my goood ayanoooo!!!!" and she just kind of glared at me like I was crazy. lol, it took her a second but then she was like "oh my god steph!!" haha. It was funny, but it's hard to remember that look of polite disdain. :) So Tokyo. Everyone in Tokyo that isn't your friend seems like they slightly detest you, somehow.

Us at the Shibuya crossing. Taiga's in the striped shirt and Ayano is in the rust colored shirt at the bottom. We were hungry so we're headed for food. Ayano suggested Indian food and since I haven't had that in a while either I was all in. :)


We were seated on the second floor, and the ordering method was kind of strange. They had those machines that sell tickets, like fast food places do, but instead of using those, the guy took our order directly, then took our money, then came back later with five little piles of change for each individual. Kind of odd.

Also he didn't ask if I wanted naan or rice, and I ended up with this HUGE piece of naan. It was really good though. :)

I got chicken tikka masala (yes yes, yawn boring, I know. But I love chicken tikka masala so sue me). It was quite good and tasted quite normal. But I guess Japan does have a pretty sizable Indian population so it's not too surprising.

I think I'm talking to Taiga in this picture, or maybe I'm just bored and staring out the window. Btw all these pics with orange dates in the lower right corner are stolen from Edwin's stash. :x So there might be a few pics of me mixed in for once...

Tatsuya looks bored too. Was no one happy to be at lunch!??! Well, to be fair he is an incredibly fast eater so he's probably been done for a while at this point and wants to get going.

Having finished lunch, we started walking back through Shibuya, and passed by this nonsense happening outside Shibuya 109. They often to promotions right in front of the building, but mostly I've seen stuff for singers and other "talents" as those sort of people are called. This one was for Monster energy drink (ughhhh America needs to stop infecting the world so much), and there were a bunch of scantily clad young ladies dancing and hanging out drinks to people. I'm sure they were just trying to earn some money to support their college degrees and bright, budding careers so...I guess it's ok. :p


Nah I'm kidding. I guess I was a little surprised because I rarely see people here that are dressed sluttily? I guess? Even if a lot of girls wear really hot or attractive outfits, they still tend to be conservative. Like maybe skin tight, but at least their skin is covered. This definitely looks more like the Western version of "hot", wearing very little on the bottom and very little on top.

Got some coffee at Segafredo (a chain), and passed by this little kiosk that's right near the Shibuya crossing. Taiga said that this cigarette kiosk is the highest grossing cigarette kiosk in all of Japan. I'm not sure how he knew that, but I'd believe it. This area gets incredibly high volumes of traffic, and plus, when do you often buy cigarettes? When you're about to go hang out with friends for a while, and smoke and drink. Or maybe going clubbing. And Shibuya's a good place to come to for that sort of thing. :)

We saw a Krispy Kreme store (when I first came here, they had just opened their first two stores, and they were incredibly popular. Apparently since then, they've opened quite a few additional franchises), and Ayano asked if we wanted to check it out, cuz she works at Krispy Kreme for her part-time job, and she wanted us to see what work was sort of like for her. Of course, this wasn't her actual branch, but just to get an idea.


I've actually never been inside a Krispy Kreme before. :3 I've only had them when people brought them to school or work or something.


While we tried to decide what to do, Tatsuya realized that he'd left his camera battery at home. Since he'd brought his fancy camera -- as well as a nice zoom lens and tripod -- to take pictures of the fireworks, he of course really wanted to be able to use it. We went to see if he could buy a new one, but it was 5000yen, so in the end he decided to go back home and get it (after many "mendokusee"s, which means "what a pain in the ass"). The rest of us decided to head to Zushi, which is about an hour away, and meet Tatsuya there. It was still only about 4pm, and the fireworks started at 7:45pm, but we did want to get a spot reserved first.

Us, partway through the train ride there. Taiga was actually originally not going to come to fireworks, and was just going to meet us for lunch in Shibuya, but we badgered him into joining us! XD lol. He had a test the next day that he needed to study for but we were like "you can study on the train" "you can study after fireworks", and before you know it he was saying stuff like "it'll take us about an hour to get there" (emphasis on the "us" hehe) so we knew we had won. Yatta!

We arrive at Zushi station! As you can see, it's sort of gloomy and overcast. I was still very skeptical that the show would actually happen, but Tatsuya insisted that it wouldn't rain. And Tatsuya knows everything and is always right so I believed...! :) Still quite a risk though, with a 1hr travel time, and a transportation cost of about $10.


We met up with Tatsuya and Yuta at Zushi. I also went to get a tarp for us to sit on, so our butts wouldn't get sandy. Oh yah, cuz Zushi is really near the coast of Japan, and the fireworks would be held at a beach. :)

From the train station to the beach, it was about a 15 minute walk down a very quaint little street. Not little I guess, it was quite wide, but the stores were all quaint! No Forever 21s here. Not even any Uniqlos here. It seemed like a pretty traditional town, a little inaka-ppoi (country-ish) but not in a bad way.


There were a few stands set up on the way, in preparation for the fireworks, selling snacks and toys and such. These things are apparently "yoyos" that people play with, and they're pretty much balloons filled with a bit of water, decorated, with a string attached to it that you use to bounce the yoyo up and down.

The beach was really pretty; the water was kind of shit but greenery is always nice. When we got there there was still plenty of spots left. And thank God people were already getting ready for the show cuz it meant there would actually be a show!

This is our little 5x5 tarp. :) When I went to the convenient store I couldn't find any tarps at first, didn't know how to ask about it, and almost bought 10 individual "large plastic shower sheets". lol! I have no idea what those even are. Thank goodness for tarp.

Once settled in, me, Edwin, Ayano, and Yuta went off in search of food/snacks/drinks while Taiga studied and Tatsuya prepared his camera.

We passed by a lot of people that were beach-bound, and while most were in regular street clothes, there were a few girls wearing yukatas, which is always a pleasant sight to see. :) Some guys were as well! I wish the tradition was observed more, because a crowd of people with over 50% in yukatas would just be amazing to see...

Somehow picking up just a few food items, as well as walking to and from the beach took us more than an hour. Mostly because we had to wander slowly through the crowd. Actually on the way in, we saw a place selling sushi and Yuta wanted to get some, and we said we'd come back and get it later. Well when we went back for it, all of it was gone!! A whole table piled with sushi, all gone. Crazy how much food a crowd of thousands will go through.

The show started with some announcements, including the theme for this year's show, which was I believe something along the lines of "Power for Japan". The first bit of the show was rather dull. Individual fireworks going off one by one, some special fireworks that are made to look like shapes or characters, such as a heart, and we saw a Doraemon. I think this part they were still in the testing phase though, since it was pretty slow.


Oh and this pic wasn't from the boring part, I just picked an arbitrary fireworks pic. I have a ton of pictures of fireworks but I randomly picked a few different ones cuz it would be too boring and tedious to load all of them here. :) I also stole a few of Tatsuya's cuz he got waaaay better shots than I did.

These were fun! like little fireworks shrapnel. I like how messy and chaotic they are.

Soooo Japanese fireworks are kind of fucking amazing. I mean sure who doesn't love fireworks, they're all great but, they're nothing compared to the insanity of Japanese fireworks shows. I think due to the sheer number of people that will attend a Tokyo show, they are just able to pour way more money into it, and since the resulting show is amazing, the next year even more people come, so they put even more money in....you get the idea. :) But yah, Disneyland fireworks are great, but here it'll be like 20 coordinated, choreographed fireworks exploding at the same time.

Multi-colored fireworks...

...odd-shaped fireworks...

...and I'm going to name this one the Dandelion firework. :)

So the show was AMAZING, and even though it was not as big of a show as say Yokohama fireworks or Sumidagawa fireworks, since Zushi is pretty out of the way, I think it was better than both of those. :) The music played a large part in that. All in all it was 6000 fireworks (vs Yokohama's which is about 10000), and it was sososososo amazing. I'm so glad we came to see it. I took some videos to show you guys, they're posted at the end of this entry. Please excuse my constant exclamations of how much I'm enjoying the show. :x


After the show, Ayano had to go to the restroom so I went to stand in line with her. Zushi's beach is not really equipped for a crowd of this size, so there were only a few portapotties for every thousand people or so. How retarded is that?? On top of that, no one seemed to be in much of a rush to finish. People would take like 5 minutes, knowing full well that there was a long line of desperate people that had just spent the last 2 hours drinking booze nonstop, waiting on them.


Still, the situation was a bit hilarious. We had maybe 20 or 30 people in front of us. At first everyone was polite and chatting, but as time went on you could see people getting more and more desperate and unable to hide it. Ayano straight up told me "yea it's reaaaal bad" so I told her to go sit on some steps to the side, and I'd wait in line. Guys were lining up along the beach, pissing into the ocean (lucky bastards), and some guy like stripped and peed on a lamppost right outside the bathrooms.


There were two girls behind us, and one of them had to go quite bad. As bad as Ayano if not worse. They struck up a conversation about it and it was really cute haha. They went from commiserating like "why is it taking so long? what are people doing in there??", to like "maybe if we hop back and forth, it'll look like we're dancing." "yea! if both of us do it it won't be so weird". and comparing strategies for how to stop pee like "if you kneel and sit up straight it helps" "really? i should try. ..... oh it's working!" and me and the girl's other friend were both kind of laughing but also feeling really sympathetic. Cuz honestly who hasn't been there before?


Then we heard that there was another bathroom nearby, and Ayano sprinted off to try her luck there. We finally reached the front of the line and I told the other chick to go first cuz I wasn't really in a bad place. It all turned out ok, and I dunno, the pee conversations might end up being my most vivid memories of Zushi fireworks. ^^

Yuta with the sushi he managed to get, and Ayano, prior to the fireworks. (Girrrrl you better put down that beer cuz you're gonna need to pee real bad soon).

Candid shot of us all waiting around after the show.

And a group photo thanks to Tatsuya's elaborate tripod setup. What a cute pic. ^^ If I remember correctly he took the group pic of us all 4 years ago at the Yokohama fireworks show, as well.

After the crowd thinned, we headed back to the station. Yuta and I got into a big argument (sort of) about my impending hair situation. It was kind of silly but he was basically saying that I should spend the rest of my Japan trip going around and seeing things and making memories, while I was saying that I don't come to Tokyo for those things, I came here just to hang out and reminisce. And really for me, the hair thing will be something of a memory. Moreso than if I took some long expensive train ride out to the countryside to see a hot spring somewhere. Anyway it was a friendly debate but in the end I think we were a bit aggravated with each other, me because I don't know why he was nagging about it so much, and well, that kind of sucked. Taiga and Tatsuya tried to calm things down a bit but I was also a little annoyed that no one tried to help, or say hey Yuta it's none of your beeswax. :3

But it's alright, we got on the train, and I just talked with the others and before long we were all back at home.....

That last little bit aside, it was a really fun time, and a great experience, and I'm really glad we went. :) Ladies and gentlemen, Zushi 2012 fireworks!!!