watashi wa brendan

i am at george's house... i feel like i was in tokyo like 4 hours ago.

we left tokyo at 12pm tokyo time, and got here 1130am eastern time... same day. we got here a half an hour before we left haha.

but anyway, i'll tell the rest of the trip from where i left off:

so i woke up in the tokyo prince hotel the next morning very very early. max was gone, i dunno where he went, but i walked around the streets for a while looking for something to eat, and i finally found a convenient store. the store was pretty crazy it had like food and cold drinks, and weirddddd pastries, and sushi and everything there had some sort of seaweed in itm no matter what. i ended up just getting a very strange pastry, some milk tea and rice wrapped in seaweed. when i got back we met masa and yutaka down in the lobby and headed over to the temple.

we went to see a famous japanese temple. it was really cool, just huge stone temples courtyards and japanese buildings. (i have pictures of all of this so i will post them later). but there were so many crazy things going on... they had these pits filled with smoke and fire and people would buy these little things with symbols that were backwards swastikas on them for 100 yen, light them on fire and throw them in the pit... it was crazy. there were also just fountains with little gourds and you had to wash your hands with them. there were also tons of people dressed in outfits i've never seen before. we took pictures with anime characters, traditional japanese women in kimonos, japanese school children and even a rickshaw driver.

after the temple we went to an awesome sushi resturant. they had sushi on converyer belts going all over the resturant and you had to pick them up. masa those us that each different color plate meant a different amount of money and differnet kind of sushi. i had tomaga, and cucumber roll... it was very cheap, only like 300 yen. masa called me a wuss though becuase 'real japanese men stack their emply plates 10 high'. but whatever, i liked it ha. after you were done, t hey just stacked your plates up, put a machine over them and it told you how much you owed... they're so advanced haha.

from the sushi place, we went to a shopping area and walked around by ourselves for a while... i just kept using the 4 japanese words i knew to talk to people and it was pretty sweet. i bought a few things and then we headed over to the show. we got all our rental equipment setup and tried to figure it out, but some of it was weird and older and hard to make it sound good... but we worked it all out.

then we met the people from big mouth and they went with us to harajuku, which is like a sweet shopping district that has hilarious things, and some cool things too. i wanted to get shoes and some sweet shirts, but i ended up not getting either becuase of how expensive it was. the shirts are so funny, they say american things that make no sense. one shirt said 'the ramones: the punctual rock music'. there was a shirt that was black with gold buttons and on the back it said 'ass man ' really fancy in gold. i have some pictures of other hilarious english phrases.

we went to the toy store next called 'kiddyland' and it was out of control, so many weird toys, and i had moto explain things to me. there was a weird bottle of liquid and moto told me it was for 'dick, up' he was trying to explain that it was like viagra, and they were selling it at a kids toy store, it was very weird. i bought a crazy little solar powered thing and some weird candies. then we went to eat at a place called 'lotteria' its like a fast food place from korea that they have all over japan now. it was pretty good, i just got like a veggie sandwich, but it was so hard to explain to the lady, even moto could barely understand here beacuse she was korean, it was weird.

we were running late so we had to get back to the venue. when we got there, we hung out with some people before the show, like sho, and the guys in good 4 nothing, and some friends we made. we even saw the girl who is my myspace picture again, and hung out with her later and got some pictures with her and her friends in those crazy photo booths.

then good 4 nothing played, they were awesome. they are really nice guys too. they're touring korea with andrew w. k. which is completely amazing, but the kids really liked them... and they were fun to watch.

after them we set all of our stuff up and played and it was so out of control. i've never had that much fun playing in my life. i was jumping, and standing on the monitors and just being ridiculous... and the kids reacted so well. doing just about the same haha. it was so much easier to have a good time because they were all just excited and welcoming about everything. as our encore we even played 'backs against the wall'... it was complete chaos. we all forgot the song at one point and george just did a bass solo.. but they still loved it.

after the show. i think i took 600 pictures with people. all of them on their ridiculously sweet advanced cell phones that were so sweet. i talked to so many people and it was really really hard to communicate, but i had fun doing it. then george, and max and sho and his friends and some people went down to the photobooth place to get our pictures taken just like all the japanese girls do. halfway there george started freaking out because he thought we were lost in tokyo and was running around the streets trying to find rob and masa. little did he know, we were fine. we got our pictures taken and then went to the resturant, unharmed, and undead, despite what george thought was gonna happen. i'll have to post the pictures, they were so hilarious.

the resturant we went to was one of the japanese places where you have to take your shoes off and sit on the floor. it was really cool, i sat at a table with masa and the guys from g4n, sho and his friends and shane's friend, rob, his friend, and jd, max and george. it was really an insane experience, everyone just drank so much sake and beer and other alcohol for hours on end. i had japanese pizza and some crazy green tea ice cream with cube of gelatin and weird balls. it was really kind of strange, but i ate it anyway becuase it was something new to try.

then we went outside and talked with random drunk japanese people for a while. after a good amount of time, we finally parted ways and went back to the hotel.

we had to be up at 7 so i just stayed up all night, so i could sleep all day on the plane. it definitely worked. i slept for like 10 hours, i woke up over russia for 1 second, then over millewauke, and then new york. it felt like i didn't even leave and it was amazing.. i couldn't eat the meals today though, it was so strange. eggs and mashed potatoes and spinach was one. and couscous with some weird vegetables that i've never seen before was another, dessert was oranges and a weird ball of white stuff. so basically i had nothing haha.

so we got here, watched our video of fuji rock and then drove back to philadelphia. and here i am... but i've written way too much. so next post will just be pictures, whenever i get them figured out.

brendan