day 66! shibuya

Woke up feeling preeettttyyy shitty. Throat was raw, stomach was roiling...I chugged a bunch of tea and got online. Taiga and Chris were both asking me what my plans for the weekend were, since it was my second to last weekend before leaving Japan. As much as I wanted to see them, my stomach really really did not. But I gathered my resolve (and intestines) and said sure, let's meet up in Shibuya at 1pm. And then I promptly dragged my feet getting ready, which is to say that I stumbled around like a drunken sailor, and didn't actually start walking to the train station til 1pm, so I was a good half hour late. Fortunately (or I guess it's actually kind of a bad sign), Chris just expects me to be late when we meet up, and Taiga was a good sport about it so they weren't too mad. :x


We met in front of Shibuya 109, and they were both clamoring for food (stomach: "nooooooooooo don't do it"), and we agreed on a well known spicy ramen place right across the street (stomach: "gg go find a toilet").

It was popular enough that there was a line outside, during lunch hours on a rainy Saturday afternoon.


It's not actually a ramen place, the sign says "tanmen", which is like ramen but I guess it's less oily? I'm not sure what the difference is, but I know there is one. :) Anyway they're famous for it being very very spicy, and you could choose bowls from level 0 to 10. Taiga, who's a pretty big fan of spicy food, got a 6 and the top layer was just a film of red oil. :o Chris got a 5, and Edwin and I got 3s. I tried a sip of everyone's and while Chris's is already a bit spicy, it's manageable. Taiga's was spicy after just one sip though so 6 is definitely not for me. >< The 3 was nice and actually barely spicy. In my condition...it's probably just what I needed. I mean I pretty much skipped the noodles and just drank the broth, which perfectly satisfied my craving for something oily and warm. Ahhh toilet. We shall meet again, some other day.

The inside of the restaurant...it's actually pretty big for a noodle place. But as you can see it's not really configured for large groups. We had to wait a bit for 4 consecutive counter seats to open up.

A level 3! Mmmm mmm oil. :)


After eating, Chris' girlfriend Asami joined us. I think most of you have already heard, but she was actually originally my friend from one of the international courses I was taking during my study abroad. I randomly invited both her and Chris along to some dinner annnnd I guess they hit it off! Because it's 4 years later and they've survived 2-3 years of Sweden/Japan long distance. Anyway I'm not close to her and I don't talk to her often or catch up with her, but it was nice to see her again. She's really cute and sweet and conservative, kind of like the "ideal" Japanese female. I do think she is one of the prettiest Japanese girls I know though, and if you've ever been to Tokyo, that's really saying something....


We had no plans in mind, so after getting some coffee (honey latte come to meeee!~!~!) we agreed on some darts. How exciting! I've never played darts before.

This particular darts place (suggested by Taiga) was nice because there was no drink minimum required. A lot of darts/billiards halls will require you buy at least 1 drink, to keep their business out of the red when troops of bored young Japanese people come in to just slowly kill time. It's a bit obnoxious though, cuz every drink will be like $5 for a tiny cup, and most of the time you don't even feel thirsty! So this was nice, though it was a bit of a walk from the station.


So if you haven't played darts before (which I hadn't), it's pretty simple. There are many many different darts games to play, but they all follow the same general rule: throw darts at that target and try to hit stuff. Each "slice" of the pie has a different point value associated with it, from 1 - 20. The larger green/red circle around the circumference gives you 2x point value, and the smaller one in the middle is 3x. Of the two bulls eyes in the center, the outside ring is worth maybe 50 points, and inside circle is 100 points. But that can all change depending on the game.


The first game we played was called 501. We split up into two groups, since we had reserved 2 machines, and it was Chris/Asami/Taiga and me/Edwin (the darts noobs). You get 15 rounds each of 3 darts per round, and your goal is to get your point total down to exactly 0. So if I hit a "10" with my first dart, for example, my total would be down to 491. Then if I hit the 2x ring for the 2 point wedge, I'd be down to 487. And after 3 darts, you switch off with the other player. If you get your point total to less than 0, like say you're at 10 points, and you hit the 18, you automatically go "bust" for that round, and play passes back to the other player. When it gets back to your turn, you start back at 10 points again. So basically at the start of the game you want to try to whittle down your total in as large chunks as possible, and then when you get closer to 0 you try to be more precise about which numbers you hit.


For me though, I was lucky every shot if I didn't peg someone in the throat or something, so it was less about trying to win, and more about trying to hit the target at all. In the end neither of us won, but we both got close to 0 thanks to some lucky 50 point bulls eyes. :)


We rotated for another game (each game cost like 200yen or 300yen to play, so they were cheap) and it switched to Chris/Taiga/Edwin and me/Asami. Boys vs girls! We played 701 instead, which is the same as 501 but you get more rounds and of course, you start from 701 points. It was nice but, I dunno, Asami is really quiet. And for some reason a lot shyer about speaking English than she used to be, so I was maybe a bit more tense during that game....


Then one more rotation brought it to Taiga/Edwin/me and Chris/Asami. For this game though, we picked this really really fun game that Taiga suggested called Kunitori, which means "taking countries", or "capturing countries". It's basically darts Risk. :D :D Fun!


The screen shows a map of Japan, split into 21 different regions, with a point value assigned to each region, and 1 extra for the bulls eye. You can capture regions by either getting two darts into the same slice during one round (e.g. two darts into the "10" slice) or by hitting the 2x or 3x for any slice. Once you've captured a region, if anyone throws a dart into that slice, they lose points and you gain points. The more consecutive regions you capture, like if you own 4 that are right next to each other, the more points you get. You can also take back a region from someone else if you hit the 3x slot?? Or something like that. So this game is really big on accuracy, which is not so much my expertise. :3  To put it mildly. To be more specific, for some reason when I try to aim at something I just miss the board entirely. If I just try to hit anything in general I'm usually ok, but in this game it means you end up feeding people. D: Anyway I loved the fact that this was more of a "game" game, and I liked the mechanics but it was a pretty miserable game for me~ Even when partway through the game, Taiga switched players with me, so I suddenly was in 1st place, it didn't help at all.....

Taiga was quite impressed by Edwin though. :( Booooo it's not fair. Why does he beat me in every game we play. :(

And Taiga is just a champ. He gets really intense and focused when it's his turn, and when he throws his movements look the same. That seems to be important, in darts.

The happy couple. I believe Asami whooped Chris in their game. And boy oh boy does Chris love losing. XD XD XD

After darts, we decided to get some dessert. Taiga looked up places on his phone, and the #1 dessert place in Shibuya was this gelato stand back at Shibuya station, in the food area of the department store (I've taken pics of it before). The gelato looked really good but I wasn't feeling it too much...

This juice seemed way way way more appealing. :) Unfortunately it was 400yen for a tiny tiny tiny cup so. >( Damn it Japan.

Maybe the gelato would have been a better way to go...

After that, which didn't last long, we still couldn't think of anything to do. Honestly I was feeling pretttty sick. My stomach was gone but I had a bit of a sore throat and my head was starting to hurt. I think just due to being out late for the last few days, lack of sleep, bad weather...it was all starting to add up. So I would've liked to go home. But you know, it was still early, and Tokyo-ites like to stay out all day. Like, it's not worth it to get out of the house and walk to the station and take a train somewhere unless they're gonna be there a while, so you can count on any hanging out to turn into an all day thing. :|


They turned to me to choose, since I was leaving soon, but I had no good suggestions for them. I said we could walk to Yoyogi Park and look for things to do on the way, and if not we could walk around in the rain, but Taiga vetoed that plan byyyy acting very surprised and making it seem like I was insane for wanting to do that. :o 

So we decided to karaoke. Yaaay I love karaoke! What a perfect thing to do when you don't feel like walking, and it's rainy outside. :) It was a bit hard finding a balance between our group because there were very few songs that all of us seemed to know, with Asami being one extreme (almost all Japanese songs) and me Edwin at the other extreme (only English songs) and Chris and I at a weird middle ground since we both seem to prefer the ol' classics and golden oldies. I still can't believe no one except Chris knew Livin' on a Prayer.... -_-;;


Highlights during karaoke included:
- Taiga singing Lithium by Nirvana. Those lyrics are so so so...Taiga.
- Asami sang some English song, by Eric Clapton maybe? I forget. It sounded great though.
- Chris Asami and Taiga sang this weird Japanese song with a crazy music video called something Radio something or other. The lyrics were printed in the video like clipart, and I vaguely remember a dancing bear that was really cute....
- Edwin sang. Period. That's a success in my book. :D

We only did 1.5 hours but it was actually just about right. Asami had a coupon, too, so it ended up being only about 1000yen/person. It was 8pm though so we all decided to go home, and even though I had a lot of fun with em, it was kind of like thank god....  I really did feel terrible. Singing loudly for everyone's sake (they weren't exactly a rowdy group of people so I had to compensate. Thank god for Chris...) didn't help the sore throat at all either.


Well so I didn't feel like eating at all, so we just dropped by the grocery store on the way home to pick up some discounted bentos/foods, and then headed back early and rested for the rest of the night. I had told Ayano (who didn't make it out to hang out with us) and Taiga and Chris that I would let em know about my plans for tomorrow, so I started researching where we could rent bikes and possibly go biking. Never finished before passing out though....