Night Life in Tokyo

Last night we met up with a group of people for a full day's worth of activities. It was all planned out ahead of time, and the guy in charge did good job of putting it all together.

We started out in Akihabara (Electric Town) with some geek stores and a five-story arcade. One store is called Super Potato and contains nothing but games ten years old or older, mostly the reeeally old school stuff. And plush Goombas.

We spent an hour at a British pub for a happy hour drink until it was time to head to the Beer Garden for dinner. This is a rooftop restaurant that offers a grilling setup on each table, all-you-can-eat foods and all-you-can-drink beer within a two-hour time frame. The food was mostly meat, of course, but they did have a small non-meat bar. I wouldn't call it a salad bar, per se, because it was more fried things than salad things, but it was a good time.

After that was karaoke, which I'd never done before. Still haven't, really, because I didn't get a song in before we left, but that's neither here nor there. For the record, song lyrics are in both English and Japanese and there were tons of songs that I knew.

Then we went to Club Atom in Shibuya to go deaf with a beat. Three floors, each with a slightly different flavor of music - one floor had hip hop and R&B, one had pop and house music, and one had electronic and trance music. It was hot and incredibly crowded (slightly less so on the floor with the electronic music), but the strobe lights were neat, the beat was pretty good, I managed NOT to kill anyone with a stray elbow, and I might have been hit on while the husband was in the bathroom.

That was fun enough for a while just to experience it, but there was no place to go to escape the monstrous music volume, claustrophobia-enducing crowds and marinate-in-your-own-juices heat, so we left after an hour or two for a McDonald's (typically open 24 hours) until the trains started running again and we could get home. Can you believe that in Tokyo of all places, a city with a population of 32 million people (the population of New York city is about 20 million according to my Wikipedia source) and an active night life, the trains don't even run 24 hours a day on weekends? I think that's insane.

We got home, showered off the gross, and went to bed about an hour after the crows started to talk.