The late night last night took a toll on me.
I was tired at work. Dr. Saito was still ill but I had enough to do. Researching and relearning a lot of terminology.
To stay awake and work effectively I drank a iced latte from the vending machine. These machines are much cooler than the ones back home. It had a countdown to when my drink would be ready and I got to see it finish as the little door opened and it pushed my drink out.
This was probably stupid of me but I had just enough change in my pocket to try one of the canned coffee drinks. I see them everywhere so I thought I'd drink one.
My body doesn't handle caffeine. I rarely have it aside from tea so two coffee drinks had be shaking all day. Caffeine has the effect of making me nauseous, causes me to cough a lot, lose memory capacity, not think straight, and shake randomly. Great stuff isn't it?
Anyways, around 6 I get a call from Ming-yee (a friend who happened to also be in Japan) asking if I wanted to meet up with her and her friends from Yale to go sing Karaoke. Now I was dead tired but I thought, "You only live once, eh?" And since we were all busy most of the time, I thought I might as well seize the opportunity.
Unfortunately she told me she wanted to meet at 7 and I still had to go home and drop my stuff off first. I packed up, went home, cleaned up, took the bus to Shibuya and then the train to Shinjuku and got there by 7:10. Not bad eh? Except they didn't get there until 8:30. No worries though. I explored this HUGE mall (Keio mall). There were 9 floors that were each quite large. Everything was ridiculously expensive... but it was still fun to shop. Mainly it was clothes so I lost interest quickly.
I was however fascinated by the restaurants all over the place... the different types, foods etc. Well since I had had caffeine as was nauseous/tired, I was far from hungry. So I walked into a Haagen-daz and ordered a mango sherbet while I waited for them. Quite good.
The rest of this story gets somewhat dicey so I'll avoid using specific name at times to protect their own identity. Who knows who'll end up reading this.
Ming-yee was there w/ a language program with nine other students from Yale. They're all pretty cool though their personality style was a bit different than mine. Nonetheless they were fun to hang around. Initial greetings and then off to karaoke. It was a little place but it had a lot of English songs and enough of them knew basic Japanese to get by. Oh right. Introductions.
Kevin, Ateesh, Elizabeth, Aflua (sp?), Rochelle, Hans, Jane, Reno, and I'm leaving one out and mixing their names. All from Yale and most are in the pictures.
Singing was fun... course I was half-dead and feeling ill but still all good. Their music tastes were interesting and definitely hilarious.
Unfortunately things made a turn for the not-so-good. Apparently some had pre-gamed earlier and long story short, one of the people had never gotten drunk before and ended up passing out and hurling in the bathroom. I stayed with a couple others to try and clean him up/keep him awake until the ambulance came and they took him away. Luckily one of the girls is half-Japanese and so she could do well w/ communicating. At this point though it was late and I still needed to make it home.
The trains run until 12/1230 depending on the train line and I had a lot further to go then anyone else. I had been planning on leaving a lot earlier but things happen. Anyways by the time I got to Shibuya (video below), the buses weren't running anymore and I couldn't even find my bus. So I had to take the train line home... I had done this once before but it was very different at night and I had also taken a taxi for the last stretch.
Again long story short, I got to the Denny's and couldn't remember how to get back home. An hour later I found a map and made it back. It was late and I was covered in... the products of their night activity... to say the least.
And the image of this little weiner dog looking scared w/ tons of feet walking past crossing a major intersection kept crossing my mind. I'd be scared to be a puppy.
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