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April 19

Spirited Away / Monja / Arun's Reggae Shot Bar

Being in a Studio Ghibli type of mood, and finding out that Kyoko, due to her pure punkrockness, still hasn't seen Spirited Away - the new Studio Ghibli movie - Jen and I went with her to see the movie. In Japan, the movie is called "Sen to Chihiro no Kami Kakushi", and has broken all previous box-office records. I saw it the last time I was here in September of 2001, but they don't subtitle their movies in English here, which means there was alot that I missed.

We headed to Ginza and watched the movie. It made more sense since Kyoko was there to explain some crucial pieces of information.

Afterwords all 3 of us went our seperate ways: Kyoko to her lab at school, Jen to Kyoko's place to chill and write, and me to Nakano station on the Chuo line, to shop at my favorite, down-home mall.

The Nakano shopping mall is filled with cheap stores, as well as stores with antique anime crap, and a CD shop that always has bins full of CDs on sale for 300 yen (that's a bit less than $3 a piece). I found a couple of good things, including albums by Frank Black, Money Mark, and SDP (Shar Dara Par - old-school Japanese hip-hop ala Beastie Boys and De La Soul).

After returning home, Jen and I later met up with a previous co-worker and friend, Ukechan, and her husband. We got some drinks at Pronto in Shimbashi, and then took the train to Teresa and Christers place over in Oimachi. From there we walked to a monja restaurant near their house. Monja is Tokyo's answer to ochanomiyaki, a type of japanese seafood and beef pancake that comes from the Kansai area of Japan. It is especially fun, because its one of those types of food where they give you the ingredients and the grill, and you make it yourself. The tastiest one is probably the cheese and mochi monja, but they have tons of different types to choose from.

Another friend, Brooke, met us there, and after dinner we headed out to Arun's Reggae Bar, for, well, more dinner! We order some scrumptious deep fried Bangladeshi goodies from the menu, as well as some interesting well drinks.

Nothing left to do after that except go to Teresa's place and watch 4 episodes of "Friends". Well, even if there was something else to do, that's what we did - they have the DVD collection. Around episode 2, Ukechan's husband passed out, and eventually they stayed over as well, so we had a big slumber party.