Matthew's Wedding in Yokohama
I went to Japan on the 3rd, for my friend Matthew’s wedding. He’s been in Japan for a long time now, I’m not sure how long except that it’s more than five years.
I'd almost run out of holiday, so I could only spend 4 days there, returning by Monday evening, but managed to pack in a lot. Many of the old crowd from high school made it over [1], so we got to explore Tokyo and Yokohama together, which was brilliant. We also were finally able to meet Tim's girlfriend Elizabeth.
We had a day (Sunday) in Tokyo (Akihabara, Asakusa, Ginza), a day (Friday) in Yokohama (lunch at the restaurant where Matthew met his wife Yumi, a visit to Sankeien Gardens, a trip on the sea-ferry to see the city from the water, a walk through Yamashita Park and Chinatown, Tom Katsu for dinner), a day for Matthew and Yumi's wedding (the Saturday), and the remaining time basically for being drunken crazy gai-jin. We also had an afternoon in the less dodgy side of Shinjuku in Tokyo, the day we arrived.
Matt's wedding was amazing — at the Pan Pacific hotel in Yokohama, with a seven-course formal meal at the reception prepared by one of Japan's most famous chefs, and lots of formal speeches. After the reception we went up to the hotel bar for a few bottles of champagne and then on to an English-themed pub (!) in Yokohama to watch the South African team demolish the All Blacks; quite a strange context for a rugby match.
Toward the end of the day we had in Yokohama, we visited a crazy little darts bar where we got so freaked out at being the only foreigners there (and clearly we didn't know what the hell we were doing) that we left for a more traditional Japanese drinking establishment. After they kicked us out at closing time we went back to the hotel and drank Scotch and played Texas Hold'em poker until 3am, for small bits of paper we ripped out of a notebook and lemon sweets (each worth 10 scraps of paper).
The night of the wedding celebration we didn't get to bed until 6.30am, which would have been fine but for the fact hotel checkout was at 10am. Finally, on the Sunday evening, after exploring Tokyo all day, we had dinner with Matt and went on to a kind of exhibition space that was temporarily acting as a bar, where we met up with Yumi and a few of their friends and went on to a Karaoke Box place! They closed at 3am, we got to sleep around 4.30, and the next morning we had to get up at 7.45 to catch the train to the airport.
Three nights sleep deprivation combined with a massive drunk didn't help at all with feeling bright and chirpy on the train... I was still drunk when I woke up, and sobered up at about 10am while sitting on the Narita Express. Most unpleasant. The flight back was spent nursing my hangover and catching up on sleep, so my sleeping pattern has gone all out of whack what with that and the jetlag.
It was a fantastic holiday; with luck, I'll have copies of all the photos people took soon, so I'll be able to post a few here. Japan seems to be a really friendly country, and the atmosphere is like nowhere else I've been. I'm really looking forward to returning sometime soon.
[1] — namely Tim, Hadyn, Josh, Clayton and me