Get ready for this to bog down your browswer…. Jenna and Evert got married in their amazing home, which was a no brainer. We’ve been to a string of great weddings lately, but Jenna and Evert were definitely on their A-game planning for this one. It kicked off with Evert’s entrance – accompanied by a marching band. That’s right, and it was all time. The band started in the street and played for a few minutes. By the time they got to the driveway, car alarms were going off and the people waiting in the back yard probably had no idea what was coming their way. Make sure you turn up your volume, especially if you’re at work:
Here’s a quick rundown of the rest of the night:
They have a gazebo with a little stream next to it in the back yard, so the wedding happened their. Everyone stood around it, and there were tables all around the pool and rest of the yard ready for after the ceremony.
Bartenders were dressed in black head to toe adidas outfits looking really good. With a little help from them, pretty much everyone there was hammered.
The DJ was great and got things warmed up dinner, which was great food grilled on the spot. They also brought in a falafel truck and parked it in the back yard.
Once dinner was done, they brought out a Brazilian band that made as much ruckus as the marching band. I can’t believe out of all the people dancing right next to the pool, nobody fell in.
This lead to more drinking, people in the pool with their clothes on, and me getting thrown in by Evert and Flo. They were nice enough to let me ditch my phone and things like that.
Extracto brought coffee and got us wired back up.
At midnight, Faz and Brandon’s band started to play, and by the end of the first song, the cops were there threatening to take the equipment and fine them $2000. After two marching bands in a normal neighborhood, it wasn’t really a surprise.
(Roll over the images for descriptions, click on them to see them larger, hit play for a slideshow)
This morning was pre-game for the wedding in the afternoon.
Met up with Vin, Meghan, Couler, & Goobkin at Screen Door for a chicken and waffles binge breakfast, the unhealthiest meal I have ever eaten in my life.
Off to the Nike employee store with Meghan, where she got me to buy into Nike + and even buy a pair of Nike shoes to go with it. I haven’t owned a pair of Nikes since college.
While we were driving around Portland, I made the wedding program we realized nobody had made, stopped at Kinko’s and had it printed in 10 minutes.
(Roll over the images for descriptions, click on them to see them larger, hit play for a slideshow)
Tara had a wedding shower lunch, I went shopping.
We met up with Lee Dexheimer in the Pearl, went to Powell’s and everything else around there.
Dumped a bunch of money at the adidas employee store, an annual event.
Made a flyer for Evert & Jenna’s neighbors asking them not to get pissed off at the impending ruckus.
Hunted down Coulter and Gubkin, and met up with them at Lorenzo’s on Mississippi. There was plenty of smack talk leading up to this meeting.
Found a cool bar on Mississippi and kept drinking
Met up with all the wedding people at Rom Tom’s and ran into Gin Yang who was in town for some tattoos.
Back to Faz’s house where Evert’s mom had spent 10 hours cooking Finnish cinnamon rolls. I also practiced some terms in Finnish, and learned "So, do you listen to a lot of black metal?" and "How many of your uncles have killed themselves this year?"
(Roll over the images for descriptions, click on them to see them larger, hit play for a slideshow)
Kicked off Extracto, since we’ve been waiting a year to find ourselves in there again.
Jumped on Facebook and continued pre-game threats with Coulter.
Went over to see Jenna & Evert’s house. Holy shit, nicest house anywhere. Watched Tepu jump into trees over and over.
Evert’s bachelor party was supposed to be surfing at Short Sands, but a sewage spill kept that from happening. Instead, we went go-karting where they claimed the karts go 50mph, which might be true if you weigh 40 pounds.
Back to Evert’s house to meet up and head to Montage. Kate puts a wedding dress on him and he doesn’t even resist. In fact, I think he liked it. He’s a good looking woman. Faz went to the bachelorette party instead.
After a long dinner at Montage, the party moved to Sassy’s and the ladies met up with us. Brandon Madrid showed up and after some good catching up, we gave him a ride home he may or may not remember.
(Roll over the images for descriptions, click on them to see them larger, hit play for a slideshow)
Part of this adventure was just the nightmare trip out at the end of the day. I won’t go through the painful details, so here it is recapped: 3 hours on the runway, switched airlines twice, ran the ENTIRE length of the massive Chicago airport (every terminal because of three different airlines), was told our rental car wouldn’t be available and was sold out, no chance of bags showing up.
(Roll over the images for descriptions, click on them to see them larger, hit play for a slideshow)
Day 11 highlights:
The flight home was no less of an adventure. United had us on an Air Canada flight through Vancouver, and the flight times changed to only leave us 55 minutes to go through customs where we had to pick up our bags and re-check them. We talked the guy at check-in into slapping some priority tags on our bags, and that was the only thing that saved us. The Air Canada flight was perfect – each set had a big touch screen with On Demand content, and a 110 outlet to plug things in as well as a USB power outlet. The only thing missing was a way to display your iPod on the screen, but I can live with that. The 10 hour flight went really quick.
Our first flight was delayed like 20 minutes, and we ended up only having about 40 minutes for customs and getting on a plane to take off. We got off the plane, ran to customs and the line was still pretty short. While we were in line, we saw our bags come up first on the belt. Once we got past the agent, we grabbed the bags, dumped them on the other belt, and got the friendly Canadians to let us in front of the security line. It was now 12:15 for a flight taking off at 12:30 and not looking good. Of course the gate was the furthest one from security, and we ran through the airport to get to it. Once we got there, the doors were closed and people were just sitting around. We thought we had missed the flight, and I knocked on the glass to get the agent’s attention, and he came out and told me the flight was delayed. 5 minutes later we were getting on with everyone else, though we were a little sweatier.
The next flight to Dulles was the inaugural direct flight, and it was empty. We made the most of empty rows, because there’s not going to be much of that anymore.
A quick layover in Dulles got us back to Philly. Our bags never made it on the second plane, but we didn’t care as long as we had made our flight. They showed up at our house the next night with no problems.
The only issue left for us was to be able to fall asleep and get back on US time. I didn’t fall alseep until almost 4:30am that night though, so going into work the next day hurt. Coming home on Thursday and just working one day before the weekend is the way to go.
(Roll over the images for descriptions, click on them to see them larger, hit play for a slideshow)
Day 10 highlights:
We had a mid-day flight back to Korea, so day 10 was wrap up for obsessive shopping. Ramon got the address for a semi-hidden Japan only Bape store, so we jumped in a cab to Harajuku and he picked up some shoes. I had to do a return trip to pick up a few more small things at Tokyu Hands, and the last step was getting it all into our bags for the flight back.
We made some pit stops at some other stores in Shinjuku, packed our bags, and waited for the bus.
I had been complaining I hadn’t gotten to eat at any sushi train places, and as my luck had it there was one in the Narita airport. There was no wasabi on my plate, but a tube of green powder so I started putting it in my soy sauce. It wasn’t spicy but it was tasty, and then the waitress saw me and said " No! No! Green tea!" Then she brought me some wasabi and it was all good.
We checked in at United and I tried to use my meager status to get at least one Economy Plus seat. We had the best gate agent, and she was clicking away on the keys and after a long wait in silence she said I don’t have Economy Plus for you because you are in business class. After telling Tara she could have the seat, a bunch more click clacking followed with "Good news – I have two business class seats for you and I’ve found some better seats for your friends." Shitya, what a great finisher to a great trip. We were actually bummed it was a 2.5 hour flight because it was so comfortable and Tara and I were both trying to ge through the end of season 1 of Heroes. We put back some glasses of champagne before takeoff and asked to send some to Ramon and Wendy. They wouldn’t send it to them, but they let them come up to hang out with us to drink which was cool. It’s a night and day difference of flying when you’re outside of the US…
We landed back in Korea and took the bus to Suwon, where Wendy’s mom was waiting with a great dinner, and her dad ready to drink. They invited two friends from the building to come practice their English. One of them was Hannah who was about 80 pounds, and she showed up half way into a bottle of scotch. Instead of sipping it, she started pounding shot after shot and turned bright red. Every now and then she would say things like "I love you. Sorry sorry sorry. I’m drunken." Once dinner was done, Wendy’s parent’s fired up their singing skills and turned it into karaoke night. Wendy’s dad barely speaks English, but he speaks it perfectly well when he’s singing it, check the video. It was the best way to finish our trip, they were such great people and so hospitable to us.
(Roll over the images for descriptions, click on them to see them larger, hit play for a slideshow)
Day 9 highlights:
Day 9 was for last-minute shopping. It was raining pretty hard so we started at nearby Tokyu Hands. It’s 8 floors of kickass department store, and we got there when it opened. We started by going to the top and working our way down, and we bought something on almost every floor. Check out the photo of the $3500 Darth Vader samurai that we didn’t buy, it was awesome. We were in there almost 3 and half hours before we realized what time it was. We did a quick check at the stores in the other half of the building and grabbed a sushi lunch upstairs.
Our hotel was a block away and we had to go drop off all of our purchases so we could keep moving. Every time was passed the Krispy Kreme, there was a long line and even in the rain the line was long. Supposedly it’s normal to have a 1 or 2-hour line, and when they opened it was 3 hours. Check the video on Liam Maher’s blog to see how nuts it gets… Just click the post on the right that says "Krispy in Shinjuku."
We worked our way over to Akihabara, and spent a lot of time at Yodobashi, 9 floors of every electronic device ever made. It’s mind-blowing, no matter what you’re looking for, there are a hundred options.
The rain kinda sucked and after you’ve seen everything in electronics, there wasn’t much point in looking at the other stores so we headed back to Shinjuku. We went to check out the Isetan department store, which was more mind-blowing retail. There’s a men’s building and a women’s building, and both are like 7 or 8 floors. It’s like Saks on steroids – huge, high end, and there were almost as many staff people ready to help as there were customers. Any department you went into had an army ready to help, and if you like to drop obscene amounts of money on really cool clothes this is the place for you. Either way it’s definitely worth checking out.
At this point we were too tired to change, so we went straight to dinner in dirtbag mode at the Century Hotel. We started with cocktails at the bar, and then into their restaurant. The views are the reason to be here, it’s all glass and you can see the whole city from here. We were so shot from the day of shopping it was the first day we didn’t go out for late night.
(Roll over the images for descriptions, click on them to see them larger, hit play for a slideshow)
Day 8 highlights:
After coming back from the early run to the fish market, everyone took naps to gear up for the full day ahead. Jenna and Evert hooked us up with Miko who used to work at adidas in Tokyo. We’d never met her except for a few quick emails and she took an entire day to show us around other parts of the city we haven’t been to. She was so fun to hang out with, and it was really generous of her to spend a day with people she didn’t know.
We started by going to Asakusa to check out an old temple. Inside there was a tube full of sticks with numbers, and you pull out a number and go to a drawer. In the drawer is your fortune. Our group spanned the whole range from bad to best, and Miko showed us how you’re supposed to tie your bad fortune to a stand in the temple and leave it behind. Since Asakusa is known for tempura, we went to a really good tempura restaurant before jumping back on the train for Ginza.
Ginza is an upscale shopping area that we roamed around for a while and then worked our way to a monorail to get to Odaiba, which is a man-made island in Tokyo Bay and what Miko described as modern Japan (after we went to see Old Japan in Asakusa.) We jumped into a huge shopping mall and got some needed coffee, and we also checked out Tokyo Bay and the Rainbow bridge. There’s a mini Statue of Liberty there that was given to them by France.
I discovered orange Fanta with mushy stuff in it, kinda like Jello. You shake it a bunch of times and open it, and then it’s fizzy with gooey mucous-like stuff – but really good.
After walking for hours, we wrapped up by going to a really nice supermarket to look for coffee Jello and load up on Japanese candy.
A quick change at the hotel and we were back in Shibuya to meet Yukari for dinner at a make your own pancake place. This was another restaurant where your table is a grill, and we got a mix of ingredients to cook up.
After dinner we met up again with Dave and Tiff and roamed around in the rain to find a bar. We jumped into one that looked good and Tara started pounding Sake.
When everyone was fried from the long day and the batch of drinks, we jumped in a cab back to the hotel since it was late and we weren’t sure if the trains were still running. The cab driver made like he knew what we were saying, but got totally lost. Once the meter hit $30, we handed him $5 and got out to find another cab. This time around, Ramon called the hotel and put them on with the driver for most of the ride and we made it back in with no problems. Cabs are great in Tokyo – the drivers wear suits and they have automatically opening doors for you when you get in. They all have GPS too, which is a mystery how the first driver got lost since we gave him the address of the hotel and then just started telling him to go to one of the biggest train stations in Tokyo.
(Roll over the images for descriptions, click on them to see them larger, hit play for a slideshow)
If you look through one set of images, this is the one to check out. This was one of our favorite parts of the trip, going to the Tsujiki Fish Market at 5:15am to see the tuna auction. The tuna was huge, and each fish was lined up in a warehouse-like room with the tails cut off and shoved in their mouths. It was pretty chaotic, with carts driving by in all directions and people bidding on fish. We watched while trying not to get run over. We walked through the rest of the fish market and saw a little bit of everything – things you would never eat to massive scallops and crabs. Watching the resellers cut up the tuna was really interesting, it would take about 3 guys to do, and they would use a 6′ sword with 2 people to cut them into sections.
Once we had checked everything out, we went to find a sushi restaurant for breakfast. We looked at a few, but saw one with a line and figured it must be good. We got in the line, and every few minutes and older Japanese woman would come out and yell at everyone in Japanese, and then grab people and place them exactly where she wanted them to stand and wait. We got lucky and got 4 seats together, because there were only about 12 seats total. The chefs didn’t speak any English, and somehow we ordered a pre-set sushi meal but weren’t really sure what we had done and what it was going to cost. We turned down a few things like raw shrimp, and aside from that the chefs would keep placing more and more sushi in front of us. Anything we questioned, their only English would come out, saying “Try it.” Everything we tried was without question the best sushi we’ve ever had, since it was probably swimming a few hours earlier. We had all sorts of tuna, sea bass, and eel. When it was all done they rung up $140 and we weren’t sure if it was per person, couple, or all 4 of us and luckily it was for all 4 so we paid and worked our way back to the hotel to go to sleep.
If you find yourself in Tokyo, this place should be at the top of your list to check out.
Friends, Portland |
chuck | 
July 26, 2008 4:38 pm | 
Comments (0) 
