Exciting Weekend

It took a couple extra hours, but we finally got custom firmware on Daniel's PSP. I ran into an unexpected problem in that I couldn't use the slim battery on the phat psp. We got it though and are gonna try it out tomorrow by playing monster hunter 2nd g.

Friday was amazing. After Daniel left I ran into 2 groups of people outside the SILS lounge. One group wanted to go drinking and the other out to eat. I choose the latter as I don't feel like spending money on booze anymore. The group I went with consisted of Terri, Michael, and Guthrey to Shinjuku. There we met up with 2 of Guthrey's friends and went out to Tonkatsu. Along the way we ran into Steve and his girlfriend. Steve had the great idea of staying out all night. I told him I wasn't too interested but then he mentioned the reason; The new subway line (Fukutoshin) is opening on Saturday morning at 5am and he wanted to be the first person to ride it. I agreed.

I went home, dropped off my stuff, rested up for a while, then headed back out to Shibuya to meet up with Steve. It was 11pm by this point. Suprisingly we also met up with Kyle, Daniel, Yusuke, and another random Japanese person. Steve handed me a Chu-Hi as a present and we were off. We took the Yamanote line to Tamachi station which is 1 stop before Shinagawa.

The original plan was to walk across the Rainbow Bridge. Steve's host family said that there is a sidewalk which is walk-able so we figured that we would be able to see a spectacular view of Tokyo from the bridge. Sad thing was that apparently the bridge closes at 9pm. Lame. We gave up on that and decided to try and climb one of the buildings next to the water. All of the buildings happened to be really high class, high security apartments. The one that we went into had card access in order to get on the elevators. One of the Japanese kids had the idea of throwing a piece of paper under the door in order for it to trip the automatic sensor on the inside. He threw a piece in and nothing happened. I was thinking to myself that we should just get the f out of there before something bad happened, but just then the door opened. I wasn't watching, but apparently he threw in another piece of paper and it worked. Crazy crazy crazy! We went to the highest floor and to our disappointment found that there were no windows. All that work for nothing!

The rest of the night consisted of us walking from Tamachi all the way back to Shibuya. Thankfully Steve knew where we were going because none of the rest of us did. I would have been completely lost had I been on my own. It didn't help that we were drinking along the way. It was a long journey to Shibuya. We walked from 12:30 until 4 in the morning. When we arrived there was a pretty large line in front of the train station. Some of the people had been camping there all night! There were newscasters, people doing interviews, and every single person there was taking pictures. A few minutes after we got in line they started letting us into the station. There was a huge line for the ticket machines, but we walked right on through as we all had suica. Steve literally walked through without paying, landing himself as the first person ever to not pay for a ticket on the new line. We waited on the platform for another 40 minutes until they let us on the train. We got to sit down and wait for the last 10 minutes. The train left at 5:05am. It was really cool to be one of the first people ever to ride the new train, but once I got over that fact I realized that it is just a train... And I hate trains...

We got off at Nishi-Waseda and had breakfast at the local McDonalds. We were all worn out by this point and didn't talk much. I went home and slept like a baby.

On Saturday I woke up about noonish, ate breakfast, took a shower, and left. I made plans to meet my new friend Emily at Baba and lazy around. And that we did. We went for a 2-hour long walk which ended in a short trip to the arcade. At 4 we parted ways to our respective other plans. I had to go to Shimakita to meet up with Nick and Jay for our movie project. We met with a member named Megumi who explained a lot to us over some ice coffee. We then went to an official meeting that is held every Saturday in the Shimokita town hall. The other members seemed happy to see us. I didn't grasp a lot of the meeting, but had a general idea of what they were talking about. After this Jay and I went home to eat, while Nick stayed out longer with them. I wanted to go to Mile's birthday party, but it was already past 8:30 and was really tired from the previous night. Therefore I returned home and slept.

Today I went out with Megumi (a different one) for lunch. We had pasta in Baba. Then we went to the government building in Shinjuku as well as the park. Megumi lives in Yokohama and has no idea of anything in Tokyo besides Waseda. I think it is pretty rare for a foreigner to be leading his Japanese friend around Japan. Nothing especially exciting happened, but it got us out of the house for a couple of hours. Around 4:30ish she said she had to return home and do homework. I followed suit and did the same, but I havn't worked on any homework yet...