On Shinjuku, Australians, and jetlag

Landing to hotel it’s one big parade. Not the banners, streamers and confetti kind, just a sea of purple shirts “JET 09” and signs “The bus ride to Tokyo from the airport can take up to three hours so take this last chance to…”. I think they used people instead of signs for most of it because they were, honest, cheaper. They’re all JET 2nd-5th years. They’re getting paid regardless. Might as well direct traffic.

The hotel is in the skyscraper district of Shinjuku, adjacent: Shinjuku entertainment district, red light. My old home. The rethread is seamless. 5 minutes and I never even left. Went out walking for photos and food. Found Australians and beer. It happened like this: my friend, Maggie, the other girl from Macalester, we can’t seem to not run into each other. 1000 new JETs in two towers of a hotel, reaching as high as 43 floors. Same elevator on the way down. 1000 new JETs spread over hundreds of cramped, crowded alleyways. Walk by her drinking with some other JETs about three minutes later. She laughs and calls it magnetism. I think “shared fate”. I remember a friend of Lisa’s and think “a glitch in the matrix”.

The boys she’s drinking with are Australians, Irishmen, Brits. I think most of them started around noon. Never caught the UK, IR kids names, they took off in a hurry. Tired, jet lag, etc. Smart money would have been to follow them home, but I was…you only get one first night back. Hugh and Adam. Funny guys. Two American girls joined us at some point. Tara and Marissa (a name I cannot ever remember for longer than a day). And I can no longer remember who started the adventure. We ran around the Kabuki-cho red light for an hour or two, stop in for a beer ever now and then, wander some more. Ended the night in a karaoke parlor on a 1500 yen nomi-houdai, a singularly elegant Japanese concept of unlimited drinks for a certain time period. Perhaps got slightly drunker than intended. It’s hard to keep up with Australians. Hugh could probably have drunk the whole table under the table. Beatles, Journey, Bon Jovi and other god-awful/awesome karaoke standards were belted out in a range of horrible off-key tones. But then that’s the point, and I don’t think I’ve ever had more fun at karaoke, because they seemed to inherently understand this. Screaming our lungs out. Dancing. Elaborate exchanges of air guitar riffs.

It was a good first night.

Jetlag and The Furies kicked me awake at around 4:30. One of my roommates is an EPIC snorer, but only when he’s lying on his side. He shifted in his sleep some time around 4:30, and bulldozing air-raid sirens shook the walls awake. Because my body was pretty sure it was some time in the mid-afternoon, it went ahead and stayed awake. I didn’t really mind though. I will later, when I die, but until then I’m thankful it got me up in time for breakfast, and to see the sun rise through the skyscraper district high rises.