Teresa's Birthday Adventure Part I: Shinjuku and Kabukicho

So Friday was Teresa's birthday and we wanted to show her a good night out on the town. The following entries describe the craziness, fun and hilarity of our ill-planned adventure in Shinjuku, Kabukicho and Tsukiji for Teresa's birthday. I hope you're ready for it 'cause we weren't.

Before we could begin our night out, we had to get a few things settled first. Earlier in the day we went to the Warabi City Office and registered for our Alien Registration cards and received our Certificates of Registered Matters. We each got three copies at 200¥ each, priced that way because of the type of paper I think. It was all very official. We then took these certificates to Shinjuku with us so we could get our cell phones at Softbank right outside of the Shinjuku station's east exit. It's that building with the blackish windows and the red 'emobile' sign at the top.

I admit I was a little concerned about the phone-buying process. The customer reps didn't seem like they knew a lot of English and this was one situation where we both, customer and Softbank worker, needed to understand each other clearly. Luckily, Jen and her awesome Japanese came to the rescue. And I may have even asked a question in Japanese. Yay for me.

We all decided to get a post-paid plan instead of the prepaid. With the post-paid it ends being a little cheaper and there are no cancelation fees, so that's a plus. The only fretful aspect of the phone-buying process was the amount of time it took. There were five of us trying to buy phones and the Softbank guy told us it would be about an hour. See, we had already moved our plans with Teresa back an hour from 5 to 6. Now, we had to call her again and move them back another hour to 7. Surprisingly, getting our phones was really easy. I got a blue one, which looked like purple on the box... and the others got green, gold and pink. We were like Power Rangers ready to conquer evil and do good with our mobile phones.

Or call Teresa and apologize for taking so long and find out where she was.

By the time we got our phones (only four of us because Hunter's Visa Card wouldn't work. Visa, you lied. You're not everywhere we want to be.), it was a little after 7. Teresa, Mia, Alex (another homestayer from Pennsylvania) and Tomoe, were already with us as I had to meet them at the train station. We stood outside the Softbank building waiting for one more of our gang and trying to figure out where to eat. As we stood there this guy tried to sell this deal to us from his restaurant. We abdicated in favor of trying to find somewhere else and we did. It was this great place beneath street level that served only beef and surprisingly they were able to accommodate all of us. Most of us had this really tasty curry dish with an omelet, オムカレ−. It was über good and my first taste of Japanese curry.

Then after dinner it was time to take some pictures. I don't know what you call them, but they're these photo booths with different themes. They're timed so you only have a set amount of time to pick 6 different backgrounds and then quickly pose. After you're done shooting the pictures you get to design them, which Teresa and Natalie did, props to them. I'm not a huge fan of taking pictures of myself but it was actually a lot of fun and I would definitely do it again.

Photo-op out of the way, we set out to find a bar so Teresa could have her first drink on her 21st birthday. Just a note here, the drinking age in Japan is 20 so all of us are of age. So we walked and walked. And walked. And walked some more. But we didn't see any good bars. Hunter and I did see a tranny though, and gave each other high-fives for spotting him/her at the same time. We saw a lot of hostess/host bars, which are basically ladies' and gentlemen's clubs, with a lot of suited men standing outside with ear pieces. We also ran into three very sketchy people. The first you can see in the right-hand corner of this picture here. Note his greasy, slicked back hair with the bad dye job; the sleazy suit and the scruff on his jaw line; the sunglasses at night are just overkill and the way that even in the picture he's in the shadows. He just screams sketch. This picture was really just a ruse to get a picture of this guy, just in case we needed to identify him to the police.

After our other two sketchy run-ins, Dan through the medium of Jen, finally directed us to a good bar. Or so we thought. It was all fun and drinks until we got the check. There's a 10% gratuity charge every time a waiter visits your table. We were not happy about this. In fact you could say we were downright pissed. But we had to pay it, what else were we going to do? Needless to say we will not go to that bar again. Lesson learned. And now that we had gotten Teresa her 21st birthday drink, we had the whole night ahead of us. The trains had stopped and now it was time to find a place to settle down and get out of the cold. But where to go and what to do?

To Be Continued…