posse-less & waiterless in tokyo

Finally in Tokyo, and man is it all neon and bright at night - pretty cool though! We ended up arriving in Japan an hour later because of the plane delay, and finally got to use my Japanese! Finally, 3 years of uni paying off! It's a little disheartening though, I knew my Japanese wasn't that good, but everytime I say something, everyone will try to respond immediately in English, which is good because I can understand them, but kinda sucky since I always end up going back to using English anyway...

Since we arrived later, we ended up getting to our hotel at around 10:30 at night, so most things were closed, and couldn't find any huge place to eat. So, ended up right in this great little fast food place right next to the hotel that was open 24 hours, and had neon signs... and golden arches. Yeah, I can't believe my first meal in Japan was McDonalds... I did have a Filet O'Prawn Burger (I'm guessing they don't know what the Filet O' part means) which isn't found in Australia so constitutes something uniquely Japanese, so I ended up doing better than my brother, who ended up with a Bacon burger. There's just something about salty, crispy strips of pork by-product my brother can't get enough of....

So other than that, ended up doing the touristy thing today - (I'll try to post some pictures soon)Went to a Japanese shrine, and and then spent over an hour hunting down some Harajuku girls in Harajuku - hey, it was harder than it sounds! It also means I'm still working on developing my Harajuku posse, so if you know anyone who's interested, let me know! Also went to Shibuya, and saw the huge pedestrian crossing. It's that one where you see like a wave of hundreds of people crossing the street, like in Lost in Translation - we even went up Starbucks to take photos of the crowd, just like what they did for the movie as well (Thanks IMDB!).



The other highlight of the day involved going to a Ramen noodle place, where instead of ordering from a waiter (well, waiters are so 2005 anyway!) you have to buy tickets for the food you want.... and then give it to the waiter, who will give the food to you... I guess they haven't really worked out the whole automated service thing yet. Guess they were afraid of robots taking over too...