My New Haircut

If anyone has seen the youtube clip of this, you know what I'm talking about. Not really, but kinda actually. Maybe you have no idea what I'm talking about, and if that is the case then log onto youtube.com and type in "my new haircut." There you would be able to listen/watch the biggest tools EVER! I think they're just kidding, but really, there really is idiots out there. I'll get to what I mean by "my new haircut" on a personal level in a minute. For now, I will begin with the intended start of this blog (minus this paragraph of course).

Nevermind from random, that has already been achieved in the first paragraph. My mind is wondering from place to place, and I'm not quite sure where to start. Oh! the places I go. Let's start with the most exciting news of the week: this past Friday night I finally made my trip to Tokyo. More specifically, the Ropongii District. Now, for many you who don't know what I'm talking about, Ropongii is the bar/club/party district of Tokyo. As we all know, Tokyo is one of the world's largerst cities in the world (actually according to www.mongabay.com it is the largest city according to population of 34,000,000 people). You can only imagine the scale of this place...and I did not go home disappointed.

So there I was (I really do leading off a story with that phrase; thank you HM2 Slyvestor), having "trained" for the past 3 weekends in the streets of Yokosuka. Having spent enough money to make my mother extremely pissed, numerous drunken calls/emails, and more than one hungover morning the next day at work, I was trained. In Yokosuka, much like Sasebo, within earshot of the shore patrol that roam the streets there is a policy of no drinking after 0200 on the weekends. It's a good rule since nothing good happens after midnight. This rule does not apply to where we were going. Yes, I said "we" meaning it was 2 other guys along with myself. My friend John Benningfield could not make it this weekend, so I went with two junior pharmacy techs from work: Jason and Matt. Though not the crew I had originally planned to be with, by the time we got on the train to go to Tokyo I knew the night was going to be alright.

Ropongii is a marathon, not a sprint. What I mean by that is the trains stop running at midnight, and don't start up again until 0600 the next day. We'd be stuck there for the night. Unless you're bringing someone to a hotel room at the end of the night (which I had absolutely no intention of doing for reasons to be discussed at a later time in this post), you have to stick it out all night. The name of the game is pacing yourself, which if you know me for longer than a night at the bars is something I wouldn't call my strong-suit...at all. Good thing I had all those crazy nights in Yoko to prepare for this night!

Because of scheduling we decided on Friday night. After work I dashed to the barbershop to get my haircut. How I miss Sasebo and my "regular" barber, Inowei, but I dealt with what I had for where I was, you know? Any ounce of common sense would have told me to then take a quick nap, but not this guy. I relaxed for a bit facebooking and youtubing. Then Matt calls me telling me that he is coming over to my place to start pre-gaming. It was about 1830 at this time and though I thought this wasn't the best idea seeing how we weren't going to leave for another couple of hours, I invited him in. Matt and I had a good time at my place, and the last 45 minutes or so Jason finally came over. Matt was about 4-5 500ml beers in him when we finally left at 2130 for the train station. I thought I was going to get a chance to skype Danielle, but turns out she was still sleeping and in fact had no recollection of our phone conversation when I called her before I left!

The train situation was a bit interesting. Jason had been to Ropongii only once before whereas Matt and I had never been. We asked quite a few people if we were taking the right routes and blah blah blah. Matt was from what I could tell had a good buzz to him, if not too good for how early it was in the night. Finally we made it to Tokyo, and instead of getting on the metro, we bit the bullet and paid for a taxi to take us to where we wanted to go. We paid $16 instead of the $1.50 subway ride. I guess we were getting a bit impatient! Once we arrived the jaws started dropping.

Now, for the past 15 months I have lived in Sasebo, Japan. It is labeled as a country town which I really never understood seeing how it's 250,000 people. Compare that to the towns of Wisconsin, and it would place 2nd among all of them right behind Milwaukee. Needless to say, I was not about to be prepared enough for what I saw. Next to the overall United States and Singapore, the street that I was on was easily the biggest melting pot I have ever seen. There were people from all over the world! I don't know how many European models I walked by, African hustlers trying to finagle me into the club that hired them to do so, and the girls! I've heard rumors about how many women walked this street, but it was still nothing what I had expected. Lots of eye-candy, but I was on a no-touch policy tonight which strangely enough didn't bother me, not one bit.

Another thing I didn't expect was the amount of peddlers. Remember those African guys I just mentioned? Well, they must have seen the expression on my face that only screamed "Ropongii virgin" and they must have licked their lips at the sight of us. We couldn't walk 15 meters without being bothered to come to this club or that bar. They appeared to be our best friends within the first 20 seconds of meeting them, and I was too in shock-and-awe to take serious note of their true agenda. I had a sliver of this the night I was in Atlanta, but even then it was from a single seemingly homeless guy just looking for a tip so he can go buy his 40 of malt liquor. Anyway, I was finally coarsed into this one club. It was a slight mistake.

Our first club of the night had a $30 cover charge (I converted all the currency charges to USD since the Yen and American Dollar is so close now in conversion rates), and it was all you can drink for an hour, kinda. At first it seemed like a good way to start off the night, but really this place was a glorified Filipino buy-me-drink bar. The girls would come up next to us and start talking and flirting which was really awkward because a)I'm not good at spitting game b) I didn't know what their agenda was c) I have decided to take a path of higher values than to sit here and fall for these working women of the night. In order to protect myself as much as possible I told them that I was actually Canadian, not in the navy, but an exchange student in international relations from Fukuoka University, and I had no family. Just in case they kidnapped me and decided to hold me ransom and tortured me with threatening to kill my family, etc. A bit cheesy and lame, but they really had no reason of knowing my story.

Matt was having a good time, maybe too good of a time. Remember how he had a strong buzz before we even left my place in Yokosuka? Add on top of this many more very-strong whiskey and cokes. I was having supposedly rum and cokes, but really it was whiskey...I decided to not argue because it was all doing to end up doing the same thing for me, the alcohol that is. When we left we decided to go bar-hopping. That was when the fun really started.

The bars were packed, the music was blasting, and everyone was dancing having the best times. Luckily all the music was in English and many American artist. Who would have thunk that Abba would have been a smash hit? How a round in a club would work: we would snake through everyone (took more than a couple of minutes) to the back of the bar. Then we would order a round where each of us were taking turns. We'd drink about half of the beer while we danced and then started our treck outside to the next bar. Luckily we buzzed enough at the very first club we were at so we didn't need to buy many $9 beers.

This one bar we were at I think we were the only Americans. Jason is Filipino by birth so no one knew about him, but I'm 6'2" and Matt is 6'5" and here we were in a Japanese club/bar and Bon Jovi "It's My Life" starts playing. I almost thought that everyone was looking at us! Kinda cool. I didn't care if I was dancing like I was a 1960's history teacher, and no one around me seemed to care either. I only wish I took more pictures of the places we went. I just hope I don't get Alzheimer's within the next 70 years or so!

We did that for a few bars and ended up at our last bar. Here I decided to dance with someone, but if said it was harmless what I really meant by it was it was pathetic to watch. The entire night I only was wishing I was dancing with someone very specific somewhere very far away. After the last bar we walked outside, and it was daylight! We saw the McDonald's arches and we began to long-step it over there, but not before the REAL ladies of the night tried to recruit us for their "massage" services. Jason and I still knew what was going on, but not Matt. The poor bastard was able to somehow look at us in the face and tell us that he just wanted to go to bed, and he went off with 2 women. That idiot! We scratched it off not as leaving a shipmate behind, but the newbie has to learn his lesson, even if that means the hard way. He'd be fine, it's Japan afterall, but he make wake up to be a little less rich than before the night started.

Jason was able to get a phone number at McDonalds. That's how many women were at this place, he was able to get a fricking phone number at a fast food joint drunk as hell, too. I decided to wait for him outside where I saw some guy sleeping in the street, passed out. Two guys were eating their McD's over him, and I asked where they were from. Their reply? "Russia" in a thick accent, it was awesome, and I wish that story could be better told, but it was one of those "you had to have been there moments."

After we ate it was time for the journey home. Waiting for the first train was one of the biggest challenges of them all. Takes real character to push through that kind of adversity, but we somehow made it. When we got on the last train to take us to Yokosuka, I closed my eyes. Only opening them to move out of the way to let someone pass, and to get off the train. We got home at 0720. What's the translation on that? Well, if we had to go stand duty (which neither of us needed to do) we could have in a worst case scenerio. I went home to do a couple of emails, and was off to bed.

This story is not over quite yet. At 1315 Matt calls me to say that he just got back to Yokosuka. Apparently he was blacked out after the very first bar, and didn't come out of his funk until that next morning when he was walking down some random street in Tokyo! Afterwards he spent 6 hours sleeping on the train and somehow made it back. It is Sunday night here, and as of Sunday afternoon he and yet to check his online banking to survey the damage. Poor guy.

Besides that my week was pretty boring. I go home to Sasebo this Wednesday which I am looking very forward to, but that is neither here nor there. What I would comment on is my admission of yes, I am actually going to a Chicago Cubs game at Wrigley Field. I bought the tickets earlier this week. After trying to decide with Danielle what to do, that seemed like the next best thing besides harassing new recruits at Great Lakes. We have logged a lot skype time this past week which is good. I will end here on this subject because this post is getting long enough!

Minor tuffle with my college class. There was some slight miscommunication with my course, and I went to do my homework tonight for my intro to interpersonnel communication class, but apparentley the professor closes conferences sometime in the middle of the week. That wasn't the case for my other 2 courses I have taken from UMUC, and an email to the teacher quickly followed my recent discovery. Grumblegrumble.

Alright, I ahve said my piece for the week. Next weekend is the 4th of July. I was supposed to make a roadtrip up to Mt. Fuji/Tokyo/Yokosuka with Kristoph and his wife, but I now believe that isn't going to happen. There is a 750 meter swim/7.5km run that is rescheduled till next weekend from last weekend due to all the rain in Sasebo (it hasn't rained that much here actually compared to the rainy season I'm used to). Nothing good can happen from that aquathon, but I'll save that for another time. Morale is high, and I'm looking forward to pressing on.