I woke up today to the sound of my phone.
Half asleep, I tried to grab it, thinking to myself that I didn't set my alarm for today, which I didn't.
It was my mom calling.
She could tell I just woke up and told me that she would call back later.
After like 10 minutes, I woke up anyways, because I couldn't really go back to sleep after that.
Got something at the convenience store.
Again.
I came back to Demetri scrambling around in the room.
He was trying to go to an aikido class that he was looking at.
It was a free class and it was somewhere around 30 min away.
But he overslept.
He didn't tell me anything about it the night before, so I had no idea to wake him up for it.
He then bolted out the door.
I skyped with my mom later, to make up for the call that woke me up.
I was telling her about the things in Japan.
Then Demetri walked in again.
He wasn't gonna make his class so he came back.
So I wrapped my call with my mom and then got a phone call from house keeping.
Demetri and I left the room while the hotel took care of our room.
Meanwhile we were in the lobby working on our essay.
In about 2 hours I was able to do around 3 pages (our essay has to be 5 pages).
Productive day.
By the time we got back to our room, I got a message from Nathan asking if we wanted to go to ramen. Demetri and I were down, so we went with Eric, Nathan, and Josh.
We talked about the festival at the Sumida River going on today. The plan was to leave right after we ate, and that way we would be able to catch the fireworks going on at the festival.
I thought a lot of people would be going.
Eric came into our room dressed up in his yukata.
I choked with laughter.
And then I asked him who was going.
He told me only me, him, Maaike, and Josh.
What.
I had to convince Demetri to go, which was kind of easy.
Then it was time to convince all the girls.
Eric went up there previously and had no luck convincing any of them to go.
So I went upstairs with Demetri and we used our 100% super effective persuasion to get Valerie, Cheryl, and Lauren to go. Shunya was also going too, we just didn't know it.
So we all went to the festival, which was held in Asakusa.
We were running pretty close on time, so we tried to book it as fast as possible.
As we switched from the Tozai to the Ginza line, we noticed an abundance of people in yukatas.
And we got on the Ginza train.
With each stop, more and more people piled in.
I was literally pressed up on the glass.
It was almost as bad as the day we went to Nikko.
We finally got to Asakusa, and then EVERYONE got off.
Professor Hall wasn't kidding: it was as crowded as Times Square on New Years.
I noticed that the SkyTree was pretty close by and had pretty lights spinning at the top.
We were walking around for a while looking for a place to camp out to watch the fireworks.
Suddenly, BOOM!
The fireworks were starting and we were still wandering around trying to find a good spot.
Finally we decided to camp by some area.
But the view was partially blocked by trees.
I suppose it was a little better than some views that other people got, so we just had to take what we could get.
Here are my favorite photos from the fireworks show (which lasted an hour btw).
I'll only include a few since it's less fun to see photos of fireworks than to actually see fireworks.
The finale was explosive.
After we were certain the show was over, we hurried like hell to the train so we wouldn't get caught in the crowd again, but it happened anyways.
We got caught in a line to the subway eventually.
The streets were so crowded they only let a certain number of people in the station at certain time intervals, as not to overcrowd the station.
We were just kind of stuck there.
Then one of us realized that we didn't have each others' real phone numbers (not that I care since we all have FB anyways, except Demetri).
So we went around exchanging phones and shiet, putting our contact info into phones.
Demetri had Shunya's phone at one point.
When Shunya gave him the phone she was behind him.
Without him noticing, and not on purpose, she moved to the front of our group.
When Demetri was done with the phone he turned around to give the phone to Shunya again.
Instead, he offered it to some Japanese girls behind him, who giggled at him.
Embarassed, Demetri finally gave the phone back to Shunya.
But that action kind of gave us an excuse to talk to these two girls.
We told them that we were from California and as many details as we could tell them about our trip here.
They were very fascinated and we kept a solid conversation going with them.
One of them was named Ikumi (like Ikumi from Jikei) and the other one was named Mami.
We also found out that they lived in Minami-sunamachi, which is just one stop from Nishi-Kasai.
Which meant that they were heading in pretty much the same direction as us.
During the train ride we talked about a lot of things with them.
Mami really liked anime, so I talked about anime with her somewhat.
When I told her I liked things like Lucky Star and Nichijou, she laughed and called me a "maniaku".
I have no idea what that means here, but it's the third time I've been called that here.
I'm just gonna assume it's a compliment.
Also, on the train ride back, someone brought up karaoke.
I think it might have been Ikumi, but I'm not sure.
Most of us were down so the plan was to go to Nishi-kasai to do karaoke.
When we got to Nishi-Kasai, we all took a group picture.
Shunya, Josh, and Valerie left us (we lost Cheryl and Lauren in the crowd of people at the festival, I forgot to mention).
The rest of us went to 7-11 since some people wanted to get some money from the ATMs.
Then we went to a nearby karaoke place.
We had a good mix of songs.
The first one we did was Evangelion.
FFS, nobody knew the lyrics in Japanese so we ended up forcing the mics on Ikumi and Mami.
We had some English songs and some Japanese ones.
It was really funny because when Ikumi's and Mami's J-pop songs came on, they had to stand up and move the tables out of the way and do the dance with the music videos.
Some noteworthy events in the karaoke room:
- I already mentioned the dancing with singing that Ikumi and Mami did, which just totally just owned us.
- I had to solo What's Up People (Death Note OP 2) without knowing the actual Japanese lyrics and just ended up screaming random shit into the mic.
- Lots of Disney songs, which the two recognized.
- Ikumi had really good taste in music btw.
- They actually had Caramelldansen in the karaoke. And we sang it. Or at least, tried to.
- Nathan and I tried to sing the Lucky Star OP. It was fast as fuck and super hard. Mami tried to help us out as best as she could.
- By the time I sang We Are (One Piece OP 1), I could kind of keep up with the pace of the Japanese letters and sort of sing along, which made me happy.
- Mami sang an enka which was fucking cool.
We ended up staying in there for like 2 and a half hours.
And was super fun.
I'm very grateful to them for hanging out with us.
After we paid and left the building we exchanged mail addresses and such for future contact.
Mami had a FB, but not Ikumi. She said she would make one though.
They had to take a taxi home, since the trains were closed at the time.
When we said our goodbyes and headed back to the hotel, I had to process in my head what the hell just happened.
We met two strangers on accident and through series of events, we ended up going to karaoke with them for two hours.
That's fucking awesome.
Olympics started I guess.
I watched a tiny bit of it when I got back.
Of course I had to cheer for Japan since I was IN Japan.
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