Tokyo- I'm not doing anything right.

I get up at 3 am to get my taxi for Bangkok airport.  Tokyo is a 6 hour flight  away.  In my ignorance, I'm a bit surprised that a city in Asia is that far from another.

I get to Narita airport, and ask the currency conversion.  The guy at the counter thinks a minute, and writes 30200 yen = $300.  Really, ¥100 = $1 would have sufficed.  Take off two zeros.  I got this this time.  I think.  I'm tired, after all.  I take out money from the ATM and hope it's $400 and not $4000.

Lisa and Timeka made reservations for the hotel, and I only have a picture of the hotel's location on a map.  I show it to a woman at the transportation desk and she gives me a set of directions to take the skytrain to one station to another, complete with arrival times.  I just trust that she knows what she's doing.

I get on the skytrain.  The trip to the airport is an HOUR AND A HALF AWAY.  Where the hell is Narita airport, Korea?  

I get to where I'm told to go, and I'm really surprised.  Every station is labeled in Japanese, English transliteration, a color and a letter+number identifier.  It turns out the subway is really easy to use, but after someone explains it to you.   For me, that person was Lisa.  

There are a couple of different rail companies.  Even though you're underground, sometimes you have to pay, exit, pay again.  You have to keep your ticket.  If you don't know the price of your ticket, you pay the minimum amount, and then pay a fare adjusted when you leave.  

There was a small issue with the woman's directions at the airport... Didn't need that last train transfer and had to turn around and go back, but the guy at the train station helped me and let me just go by.

I get to the hotel around 5 or 6 that night.  Lisa and Timeka are just waking up.  They were at a hip-hop club.  They were going to go to another one tonight.  I'm pushing through the tired.  I'm doing it.

We to Roppongi to get some food and go to a club recommended by some DJ they met.  I'm not particularly excited by Japanese food, but it will be a relief to not be on the constant search of excellent food.  Just trying to get fed tonight.

Lisa and Timeka have been having a really hard time getting food.  Timeka is not adventurous, and everything looks out of her comfort zone. Lisa is more adventurous, but she doesn't eat pork or beef.  We find one restaurant that looks ok and has an English menu, and it has a number of people in it.

The food is mediocre at best. They show a picture of two yakitori skewers of Shisito peppers, only one arrives.   Same with the squid.  Not particularly exciting, not terrible, but $12 bought a really small amount of mediocre food.  Those were four okra-sized peppers for $3.  After amazing and cheap food in Thailand, I was a little let down by tokyo so far.

The club was also a let down.  They'd play good old school hip hop, and then weird couple of songs that killed the vibe.  Te three of us are the only ones dancing for a long time.  The club doesn't really get going until 1:30 in the morning.  There's some cute girl, who is dancing with a reluctant boyfriend.  I grab her to dance with us,  she dances with us all night.  

The owner and managers at the bar are bringing us shots a couple of times through the night.  They're supposed to be pink lemonade vodka, but I taste no vodka.  That's fine.

It was fun, but the highlight of the evening comes when a beautiful japanese girl all decked out when everyone else is all casual comes in.  We're kind of staring at her, and I didn't want to be rude, so I ash, "you look so beautiful!" And she says back to me, "oh no!!  You are really sexy."  

That was the craziest it got at da club. 

The next day was an improvement, a mild one,  We went to harajuku to see the parade of anime and costumed out girls a the park.  It was the hottest day we'd encountered our whole trip.  We didn't see too much, and it was crowded as hell, and we lost interest quickly. 

We took a break at a mall.  An aircon mall.  Timeka just wants a sandwich.  I suggest Starbucks.  It delivers... She gets an American-style sandwich.  She is over it.  Lisa and I get some teriyaki from the 7-11 down the road.

I was told, by a Japanese girl, that the 7-11s have great snacks.  She's right.  They have a huge selection of alcohol, iced or hot coffee in cans, energy drinks.  They also have fresh sushi, rice balls (really, triangles, stuffed with fish or vegetables, wrapped in nori seaweed).  There's a 7-11 style place called Lawsen's that is similar.  We go here at least three times a day for drinks, coffee, snacks, and I'm eating as much matcha-flavored stuff as humanly possible.

We get back to Timeka, and she is all up in these two young Japanese girls' business.  They're doing math.  They're expanding binomials with a power of three by multiple multiplication.  Timeka and I are now trying to teach them Pascal's triangle and the pattern expansion.  It was priceless.  They were trying so hard to understand us and I think we're surprised when the answers were correct.

 I decided it was ramen time.  So I asked the cops where there was ramen.  They run out of their little office and show me a place a block away.  "Is it good?" I ask.  "Eh," I reply.

I don't know, it was pretty good to me.  At this place, you have to punch some buttons on a machine and pay, and the a ticket comes out which you give to the waitress.  

So few people here speak English, it seems.  But everyone is so very helpful. All  of the time.

The crosswalk at our corner yells at us not to cross when the light isn't green.  It's yelling, "dangerous," And it think it's for the blind but it might be for us, too.

The little older lady that runs our hotel, in her curlers and pretty dress, runs after us to give us umbrellas because it looks like it's about to rain.  I show her I already brought my own.  She gets so excited that I seemed prepared, she hugged me.  Seriously, a huge hug.  Adorable.

Things started looking up from there.   

Lisa and I pick a teriyaki joint in the neighborhood that is populated by Japanese dudes.  We're having a beer.  And even though we had dinner just a short time ago, we order a couple of skewers just to be good patrons, and to get some protein into Lisa cause she only had fried rice.  

Instantly, we're the center of attention.  This 30 year old guy and his 50 year old boss start buying us food, just to try Japanese food.  We didnt want to be rude, so we're eating, pretty much for sport.  They buy us beer.  The young guy speaks really good English, the older guy, not so much.  But he is somehow really, really funny.  

He asks Lisa what her type is.  She says, "David bekham."  He says "oh,  I am Japanese bekham!"  

Now the young guy and his boss behind us are trying to buy us drinks and food.  Very adorable.  The first pair of guys try to take us to karaoke.  We are so damned tired.  We tell them we have to get up at 3 to go to the fish market.

"The fish market will be there the next day," they tell us.

We laugh, and make a date to meet there tomorrow.