hot and then not so hot
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Today was a blistering hot day. I spent the morning at the office doing some production crapola, but then headed out into the a district close to the office called Ginza, which turns out to be like Toronto's Yorkville district but to the power of ten. It was insane. Every brand name retail outlet seemed to repeat on each and every block. I was shopping for gifts, naturally, and managed to pick up a couple of nice things despite everything generally being outrageously expensive.
Then I went over to Jon's place with the intention of going over some paperwork and picking up his laptop. Instead, we watched Simpsons and drank tequila.
And then we went to the home of an English friend of Mari's from the office (she'd arranged to wangle us invites) and she and Chika and Jon and I descended on that place. Our hostess - who told her story of surviving the tsunami when it hit while she was on vacation - had a small inflatable pool on her balcony and in retrospect I should have removed the data point and my wallet from my pockets as soon as I saw the thing, because it was only a matter of time before I wound up being pushed into it. I never saw my assailant(s) but I had to assume that it was either our hostess or her friends or Jon, so I corralled Sleeuw in (he dove in of his own accord after acknowledging the inevitable) and picked up first Chika then our hostess and dunked them in.
And that was about 02:00 in the morning, and then the neighbours started yelling for some reason and we had to go in. I've read that it's usually loutish foreigners (and not civic-minded Japanese) that cause most of the noise complaints, despite being outnumbered by locals by 40:1.
I have not behaved in such a fashion since... oh hell I guess it was my last invitation to a house party which was my cousin Ann's in June of 2003. So, if you're looking for a 195cm lout for your house party....
Somehow I managed the cab trip home "Cerulean hotel, Shibuya" comes naturally enough even in the wee hours and paid with soaked thousand-yen (in Japanese, the 'y' in "yen" is no longer pronounced, so that's "san en") bills.