Day 3: Harajuki/Rappongi

If Mandrake was where you go to buy anime figurines, Harajuku is where you go to see them in real life. Lots of young people dress up in crazy outfits like their favorite anime characters. But I don’t think it’s done to be ironic. They really mean it. I kept expecting them to take off into the air shining with big starbursts of light. This never happened.

We walked a lot more. Went to another awesome toy store called Kiddyland that had toy vending machines where we bought more guys for my nephews and a few for Angelica.

A note on vending machines: Many of you probably know this but vending machines in Japan rule. You can literally buy anything. Ok not literally. But you can buy cameras, toys, CD’s, DVD’s, sushi, every kind of drink you’ve ever seen, underwear, cell phones, and probably nun-chucks although I didn’t see them, I’d just really like to believe it is possible. In fact you could subsist in Japan on only things purchased from vending machines. This is an experiment that someone should try.

We ate authentic Japanese pizza for lunch. It tasted a lot like other kinds of pizza I’ve had before, only we were in Japan. One of the most fun things about Japanese restaurants is that when you walk in all the cooks and servers yell a greeting. I believe they say something like “welcome.” Japanese people are very nice.

After lunch we walked around Harajuku some more. This place is wild. We saw some awesome shoes but couldn’t buy any as both mine and Angelica’s feet fall outside the range that they stock.

Enough Harajuku, we got on the train and took it to Roppongi. At first we didn’t like Roppongi at all. It seemed to be full of things like TGI Fridays, sluts and American frat boys looking for said sluts. I wish them luck.

But Ange and I were looking for neither a TGI Fridays, nor sluts, nor American frat boys. Although it was raining, and we needed to “Find our bearings,” so we actually did sit down at the bar in the TGI Fridays to “Find our Bearings.” The bartender was maybe the sweetest guy ever, he wanted to practice his English with Angelica and I, and was also practicing doing Cocktail-esque tricks with bottles mostly to show off for Ange and I.

But to go with the sweetest guy ever was something on the exact opposite end of the sweetness scale. It was an old American guy chain smoking some form of Marlboro cigarette picking up an older woman all in the span of ten minutes as we looked at our maps. It was like watching a train crashing in slow motion, disturbing, slightly nauseating, making you feel that weird feeling in the pit of your stomach, yet transfixing. It was physically impossible for us to look away. We got our bearings and left the TGI Fridays at the same time as the American and his new friend, Ange looked at me and said, “They’re totally going to do it.” Yes, yes they were.

After “finding our bearings” we decided our feet had had enough abuse for one day and we would go see a movie. Two hours for our feet to recoup. So we headed for a theater that turned out to have the largest theater screens in all of Japan. Sweet.

(If you don’t like or know about Ultraman you can skip the following paragraph. Unless you know or like the Brady Bunch as I do make a random Brady Bunch reference.)

But it gets better, at the entrance to the theater we looked across to see we were also right by the Roppongi museum which has a wing dedicated to Ultraman. What? How could the day get any better? We bought our movie tickets for two hours later and spent two hours in the Ultraman exhibit. How can I express this in words? Ok, sorry for the long winded unintelligible analogy but this is the first thing that came to my mind. But the Ultraman exhibit was like sitting on one of those dunking machines like the one they had on the Brady Bunch, you know, where you sit on a platform over a tub of water and someone throws the ball at the target dunking you in the water. So I’m sitting on the platform and Roger Clemens in throwing the balls at the target, and he hits it ever time, but instead of falling into water I fall into a tub of 100% pure awesome juice. Over and over again. Awesome juice. Every suit ever worn by every Ultraman, and every Ultraman friend and villain. Models of cities destroyed by his battles. A wall explaining all of Ultraman’s various weapons and attacks. And much much more.

Finally we left and went to the movie. I Am Legend starring Will Smith and CGI vampire like creatures. It was pretty good. Really good caramel corn. And rice balls (more on rice balls later).