October 10, 2009

Hello everybody!

I am pleased to report two things:
1) I finally left Mitaka!
2) Every picture in this entry will be a picture that I took!

I realize that I have not been taking enough pictures. It has gotten to the point where people are having a hard time distinguishing between pictures that I have taken, and pictures that I have taken from off the Internet. An example is how my mother thought that the picture of the performance of Wicked that I used in an earlier post was of ICU students. I fondly recall a recent skype conversation.

"It looks like Broadway."
"Um, Mom, that IS Broadway."

Well, anyway...

Yesterday, I finally left Mitaka-shi. Mitaka-shi is one of Tokyo's districts. It is not a particularly crowded one. In fact, I think the local Don Quiote (a brand of convience store) is the area's biggest attraction. So, I finally went out of Mitaka-shi with Joey.

We had a mission.

That mission was sushi.

REAL sushi.

The good sushi. The kind that you can only get in Japan. The kind that people dream about at night. The kind that drives people to go to restaurants staffed with Japanese servers and get the best raw fish that they can buy. But that's not real sushi. No, Joey and I wanted the real thing. We went to the station at Musashi-Sakai and waited for the train that would take us to Shibuya.



It was kind of surreal standing at the platform. You see, I have always seen pictures and movies of Tokyo where everything was unbelievably crowded. However, in Mitaka-shi, it is fairly quiet. It is never too crowded and things never feel to hectic. The platform at Musashi-Sakai was pretty much the same.



Only a few people populated the platform and even then Joey and I talked in hushed tones. He fidgeted with his cell phone and I fiddled with my Canon Powershot A480 as we awaited the train that would take us into the heart of Tokyo.

The first train only lasted a couple of minutes and we switched trains in Kichijoji. It was at the platform that I first realized that I was in Tokyo. As we were trying to get onboard the train, a flood of people collided into Joey and me. It seemed like a school of fish, moving and acting as one. It was impossible to see beyond the initial wall of people, so Joey and I blindly forced our way towards our train. Once inside, we endured a ten minute train ride that was rather uncomfortable. A second school of people had flowed into the train, pushing us against each other in a way that in any other country would probably have been deemed fairly inappropriate.

When we spilled out into Shibuya station, I finally felt for the first time that I was in Tokyo. It was unbelievably crowded. As we went up the escalators to the restaurant section of Shibuya Station (where our restaurant was located), I tried to take a picture of the crowded streets. The result was fairly impressive considering that I didn't use a flash, shot through a window, and was moving at the time:



When we arrived at the sushi restaurant, we had to wait in a line for about twenty minutes. It was about at this time that a classmate named Hikari joined us. I was in one of my classes, but we had never really spoken much before. In fact, we had spoken so little that I was shocked when he opened his mouth and a perfect British accent came rushing out.



Left: Joey, Right: Hikari


We spent the rest of our wait talking about one of my favorite subjects: movies. Oh, how we waxed philosophical about the world of cinema. Our conversations were made all the more poignant by the fact that we had to stand next to a gigantic Japanese advertisement that featured vintage photos of Audrey Hepburn.


Why Audrey Hepburn? Well, why not?

Ah, crap, it's really late.
I'll finish this story tomorrow.
This is Nate in Mitaka, signing off as just another gaijin.