Last weekend: Sunday

At long last I made it to Harajuku today. Steve, Matteo, Laura and I went to try to find some cos play kids and basically gawk at the freaks. Harajuku is well known as a place young people go on weekends and dress up as comic characters. It was one of last destinations on my list of places in Tokyo to see before I left.

As it turns out though, we picked a bad day to look for cos play kids. It was a bit rainy, but that probably didn't matter too much. Actually, when we got to Harajuku we discovered that there was a giant dance competition called Super Yosakoi. It seemed to be sort of traditional Japanese dances mixed with some more modern stuff.

There were stages all over the place. We'd walk away from one stage and find another. This happened about 5 times. We'd go to leave the stage and see something else and we'd just find a new place where they were dancing. They even had a whole street closed and were dancing up the street following huge trucks with PA systems. On the trucks were members of the dance group who's only job was to sing. The odd thing about these groups was that they all danced up the street to the same song. The people on the trucks all sang their own variation of this song. The majority of the song just consisted of them saying "hey" on the downbeat, but there were a few other sweet parts where they would sing "sore, sore, sore, soreee" (that's sore -ray, not a muscle ache). The remainder of the lyrics to the song can only be described as what sounded like Japanese old school hip-hop. The guys would sing pretty fast and melodically.

There was one group that had more of a ska feel. They sang a different song. I took some video with my camera just to record the song, but I think it was so loud that it overwhelmed the microphone. You can still make out the melody, but not too well.

Anyway, we walked around Harajuku all afternoon. A few other highlights included finding a döner stand and me speaking German to avoid taking a survey or something. The döner stand was probably my favorite find in Harajuku. I was so psyched to see it that I made everyone walk back to it for lunch. The guy who ran it was really nice and was wearing a red cowboy hat with the symbol from the Turkish flag on it. As it turned out, his wife is Italian so he was able to speak Italian with Steve and Matteo. I devoured my first döner so fast that I had enough time to get a second one before the others finished their first. I got it with a mix of spicy and garlic sauce because I didn't know how spicy it would be and drink options were limited.

The speaking German part came after the kebab. There were people on Omote-sando Dori trying to stop us to ask us questions. I'm not entirely sure what for since we didn't stop. I avoided some of them and was aware of their presence. When one finally did get me, I just spoke to her in German, which I think really confused her. She was guilty of a crime I myself had begun to commit, namely, assuming all white people you see in Japan speaks English. I just stonewalled her with German and continued on my way.

In our wandering around Harajuku I learned that Shibuya is really close by and that's where we got the train home from. Actually, we took the train to Shinjuku and went bowling first. The bowling was pretty much just like home, except all the score keeping was in Japanese and it was on the 7th floor of a building. Also, this particular alley used animations of penguins during your turn to show splits, spares, strikes, etc.