Japan Day 5 - Muthos (aka the Legend of Max Sanbyaku)

i am just going to try to type in as much as i can of my notebook that i wrote last night before time runs out on this machine. we got back from muthos around like 1am so we had to run back to the ryokan.

so we started out the day going to mejiro. got breakfast at the eki at a bakery, then went to bookoff. there was a festival going on outside the station... so this was a good bookoff, anywy- i found a ton of stuff including another iidx 3rd. then we went to shinjuku to get DJ postcards and stuff. we went to the odakyu dept store and after i asked a few people we found a stationery store with tons and tons of cool postcards! then we went down to the station. after some confusion about which train to get on we went on the subway to sagami-ono.

here is the bad part. we switched to the katase-enoshima train... and we got almost all the way there before i noticed the line on my paper saying "get on that train... and get off at yamato". we were like ten stops past yamato. luckily we caught an express back to yamato, so we got there like 2:30pm... we were supposed to meet james at sagamino at 2pm. oops. i called james from yamato and then we caught the sotetsu to sagamino and james was at the station, yay! so he walked us to muthos then. wow! muthos!! WOWW!!! it has a iidx 9, pnm 19, dm8gf9, DDREX. nobody was tehre when we got there so we played some iidx and stuff. then Yasu showed up. i wasnt sure how to talk to him and felt really shy so i didnt for a while until he started AAAing stuff... then i was all like "SUGOKU JOUZU" and stuff and took pictures. james was translator a little too. then we were going to go to another arcade since miyuki had shown up nd we wanted to do UFO catchers, and aaron wasnt there yet... but yasu started paranoia brothres Oni, and then Aaron showed up\! yay aaron! so we left anyway for a bit to go to the other arcade and a supermarket to grab dinner, and then came back to muthos like 45 mins later.

i got to talk to aaron a lot. he's a reallly nice guy. i felt comfortable around him like immediately. he's really nice and really cool and really seemed to want to be a good host for us, especially since DJ brought him a ton of american chocolate bars, haha. so aaron kept explaining to the people there who we were, that we came all the way from seattle, etc. heh.

i saw a ton of people get AAAs. the funniest part is... well, i wont tell you the funniest part. just trust me, take a look at my memory card sometime next time i am playing DDR at the same place as you and you will get a really good laugh.

Yasu AAAed a whole bunch of paranoias, and of course he did max 300 for me and theres a picture of me posing with yasu and the AAA, and Take showed up a lot later but did Sakura and Bag for us, and this guy K.K. did Xenon and V oni and Gamelan... all in one game. Aaron did Twilight Zone, extra stage, no bar! And he almost double AAAed blonde girl doing both sides single, wheeeee. oh and he did AM-3P heavy stealth mirror too! that was SO FUNNY. Those muthos guys are scary scary good. they are also pretty nice even if the language thing was awkward. james and aaron and i would be sitting there tlaking in english and yasu would run up like "EIGO WAKARANAI" and we'd yell back random things like "you should learn" or whatnot, haha. it was funny. after a while i started talking to yasu in japanese and he was all like "oh you know japanese! cooool, why dont i give you my email address and you can write to me in japanese!" so i have a piece of paper with yasu's email address, which i wont spell out here, but lets put it this way, it has max300 in the username somewhere. i just cracked up at that.

yasu is crazy. aaron is crazy nice. KK was kinda weird but whatever. i saw Sayaka/As there too but she only played drummania, no DDR. around 10pm a girl from hong kong named cindy showed up and she also had been looking for muthos. it was funny since she was trying to talk japanese to everyone, and it was awkward, so i go "eigo dekimasu ka?" and she goes "yes" snd then it was a lot easier! haha. after that aaron left with us since it was 10:30 pm and he had to get back to the station too to go home... so we walked to the station and got on the train with him and left him at yamato to go our separate ways. wow! aaron is great. everyone should go to muthos and hang out with him!

we finally finally got back to ikebukuro around 12:35am and were starving... so we hit mcdonalds, came back to the ryokan, and went to sleep. yay.

this morning my friend dave kowalski came to the ryokan to come get us and now we're ahnging out with him for the day. Daves wearing a PGSS 96 shirt. how cool :)

so that is a short version of the muthos story, i'll edit more in later.
man, it was cool. those guys are great :)

i wont talk about how poorly i played DDR though. it was embarrassing. i am so out of practice.. but i really erally really sucked. blah.

byeybebyebybyebybebyebye

Japan Day 6 - Touristing with Kowalski (Shinjuku, Shibuya, Ginza, Ueno, Kanamecho, Ikebukuro)

so today started when, as i mentioned at the last entry, my friend dave picked us up at the ryokan. wow! so dave is a really old friend of mine, he was one of my students at PGSS 96 and unlike a lot of other people we stayed in touch over the years, i last saw him at otakon 2001 by accident... well... he is in JET now, so he came down to Tokyo for the weekend to hang out with me today! how cool of him :) dave still hasnt changed a bit, he's still a total sweetie. we talked a lot today about the past, and about our other friends from pgss, and about college, and grad school, and anime, and marching band, and japan, and jet, and seattle, and everything, and it was just so good to catch up! but i felt kinda bad for DJ because dave and i would just sit there babbling about stuff.

yeah, so dave is more of a touristy person than we are, so we did lots of touristy things today. bought an all-day JR pass for Y730 and train hopped all day.

first stop: shinjuku. went to west shinjuku again and ended up by sportsworld AND Yellow Submarine the gaming store, so i bought more Kanji d6es - I think I have like 10 now, to give to people. I also got Drsgonlance vol 1 in Japanese. HOW AWESOME :) We got kaiten sushi for lunch and it was fantastic and relatively uncrowded so we kept asking the sushi chef guy what different stuff was called and so it was funny since we kept talking to him in Japanese. I think i was putting on a better accent than normal to impress Dave, heh. So after that we headed to the Metropolitan Buildings or whatever they are called. On the way we saw a dancing festival, took some movies and pictures of it! it was awesome. the TMB or TGB or whatever they called it was pretty cool - so it's just as high as the tokyo tower, they have two buildings, a north and south one, with observation decks - and its FREE, best of all. We took a ton of pictures of Tokyo from up there, sadly it was so foggy out you couldnt see the mountains in the distance or anything, but oh well.

After the Metro building we went to a small shrine next to the park by the metro buildings... and then we headed out of Shinjuku, to Shibuya. All we did in Shibuya was look at Hachiko, take pictures, and get back on a train. Oh, in Shinjuku I also bought a IIDX controller since ive wanted a second one and hadnt seen many this trip. It appears to be new and it cost me Y6950 - take that for what its worth. yay new controller :)

ok, so after shibuya we decided to head to Ginza. Oh man, Ginza is scary expensive, its like walking down 5th avenue in new york or something... but, they block traffic off on sundays or smoething so we walked through the middle of the streets. saw lots of people out with their kids and dogs, like seattle! whee! we went into a GIGANTIC toy store, it was crazy packed with people and fun toys. I saw a lot of board games in japanese, took some pictures of Catan games and even took some Apples to Apples japanese pamphlets, i'll give em to some of you guys when i get back! the store had a huge stuffed animal section. On impulse (and won't nickjong be jealous) i bought a stuffed Jiji, like the cat from Kiki's delivery service. ITS SO CUTE. I think i will be Kiki for halloween this year as a result! Yeah. Anyway, after the toy store we decided to leave ginza since we'd been wandering around a lot and they dont have comics or videogames or CDs there and what else do we care about anyway? yeah. We did find the statue of Godzilla on the way out and took pictures. heh.

Went to Ueno to get dinner and hang out. CARL BRAD OREN youll never believe this but we went to the EXACT same Tempura place for dinner that I went to two years ago with you guys! it was so cool! we had tempura and tonkatsu and it was awesome! unfortunately i could not find the arcade brad and I spent so much time in, where i first placed PPP. oh well. sad! but otherwise it was good. Went to Ueno station to see off Dave... they have a Hard Rock CAfe there in the eki now, isnt that crazy? So i bought a t-shirt of course, for the 20th anniversary of HRC in japan. the ueno station shirts spelled it Uyeno and i didnt like that. Dave went to an omiyage shop and picked up a bazillion cookies to bring back to his JET office and stuff. Then I had to say goodbye to him. So sad! But, if anything, I feel confident that I'll keep in touch with him more. Maybe I should come back and visit Fukushima sometime next year! it's near Sendai, and I kinda want to go there sometime.

DJ and I stopped in a bakery in the station because DJ now has an uncurable addiction to melon bread, and then we headed back to Ikebukuro... well, we also stopped back off in Kanamecho so I could get I-gene his IIDX 4th, since I didnt grab it last time. rawr. Now we are here in the arcade. DJ's playing PNM upstairs and Im writing this stuff... and I just sent email to Yasu. I wonder if he will actually write back. That would be so cool :) (Yes, to those wondering in the last few posts who I am talking about, I do mean aaroninjapan and yes THAT yasu and take and the rest of the gang. And they really are that crazy and scary in real life!)

Man, I'm gonna miss Japan so much. SIGH...
bye again, gonna go check what time the game is tomorrow... I cant wait for baseball! WHEE!