2001-08-13 - 9:34 p.m.
Saturday, I met up with about a trillion JETs for a tour of Chiba City. Though Lela and I managed to lose the group in a massive department store, the point was made: Chiba City is a place we'll come back to. Closer than Tokyo and a lot less hectic, Chiba has a lot of the big-city things that Kimitsu lacks, namely Indian restaurants, movie theatres, and excellent shopping. Oh, and it also has a monorail, this futuristic-looking thing whose steel beams snake throughout the city, lit a subtle blue at night.
Lela and I spent Saturday evening in her neighborhood, Ichikawa, a very urban suburb of Tokyo, about 20 minutes from Tokyo Station. After getting a drink at a very cozy bar decorated with a South African theme, we decided to stop off at one of the arcades and get our picture taken in one of the picture booths. Simple enough, you say, eh? Hardly. Once we got into the booth and deposited our 400 yen, we were faced by two adjustable cameras (one at face level, and one, oddly enough, at waist level, pointing up) and about 500 different choices of backgrounds and borders, displayed in Japanese on a small screen. We pressed buttons at random, screens changed, more Japanese words popped up and blinked, a light flashed, and the next thing we knew, we were holding a sheet of sticker photos with two poses -- in one, I am laughing hysterically and Lela is scratching her head, in the other, we are caught unaware by the ever-flattering "waist up" shot.
Eager for more bungley stories to put in our online diaries, on Sunday Lela and I headed to Shibuya in Tokyo for a day of shopping. We witnessed, in no particular order:
-A combined nail salon/arcade
-A line of people waiting to get stuffed animals (which they had just won at an arcade) inserted into huge balloons with confetti and blown up
-Signs for hip hop and rap record stores called "Sounds of Blackness," advertising "Real Black Music!"
-A shop called "NYC Queens Hip Hop Store"
-Free shots of rum given out as samples at Tokyu Hands department store (which btw, has 7 floors, divided into 3 and staggered -- 1a, 1b, 1c, etc. -- massive).
-And, in Chiba station on my way home -- a fish tank on the train platform.
Tomorrow -- another festival.
