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The morning after the wedding we got up early and left for the airport for Tokyo. Wendy’s mom had bought the tickets for us and luckily they were on United. I was able to get one of our seats updated to economy plus but not the others because they were booked separately, so Tara took her long legs up front. It wasn’t really a big deal since it was only a 2 hour or so flight anyway. The two hour flight ends up being all day of travel though, and we took a bus to our hotel and got there around 5pm. It’s been six years since I was in Japan, and we were really excited for it.

We left for Shibuya to meet Yukari for dinner. Once we hooked up we went into the 109 mall which seemed everything Japanese – total chaos of Japanese girls shopping, competing music from 5 stores at once, hot and stuffy, and tripping over people. It was fun to watch but after 5 floors of it we left and moved on to dinner. The restaurant was made up of small, walled-in booths with blinds at the end. When the waiters would come, they’d pull up the blinds, talk to us, and then pull them back down. They kept bringing different rounds of food, and we chased it was sake bombs. Being in Japan makes you realize how normal the people in Korea are. Besides the obvious Asian side of things, Korea seems a little more Western and a lot fewer crazy trends.

From there we walked around stores in Shibuya. I stopped in front of the Apple store to download email on the iTouch because it’s really hard to find open wireless in Tokyo. In Korea, it was everywhere and really easy to do. The iTouch came in really handy, especially since the iPhone is always looking for a signal and killing the battery. We worked our way over to Roppongi to hit a really smoky bar and then met Yukari’s friends at another bar. By the end of the night the lack of sleep had caught up with me and I was spent.