"Rop-pon-gi... Rop-pon-gi... Rop-pon-gi..." The quiet female voice coming over the intercom on the subway system should have sounded more like a warning then an announcement to us last night as we were delivered to a Vegas-like strip in the middle of Tokyo.
Flush with cash from a board sale, we were 180 degrees from where we started the morning. Flat broke, worn down and feeling pretty gritty. We decided that it was time to stop slacking and get back to work. We hustled around Tokyo for the day with a board bag containing 2 boards and didn't stop until we had them sold.
Our sweet little hotel room turned out to be located in the "Korea town" district in Tokyo, we finally realized why our very poor and limited Japanese wasn't getting any response from the locals. Turns out we'd flown all the way to Japan to hang out in Korea. Didn't phase use though...
Here's Nick making the best out of our non-smoking room, he's climbed out of the window and is perched on the sign above the front door smoking. Turned out to be a good vantage point to watch other people in the neighborhood do their jobs.
We were in a pretty sleezy part of town... I'm not gunna lie. We didn't even realize it... actually we thought it was pretty nice. Sure beat camping in the Van at the Sugarmill in the dead of winter. Here's a sign on a nearby hotel. Ours didn't have a sign like this and we're pretty sure the hotel next door was actually a brothel. The one we stayed at the first night...
Heck... the room even had sweet green led-lighted toilet water.
Yeah. Anyway, Roppongi. We ended up at a club and partied until sun came up. We lost our navigator Rawdawg to the darkness and were left to our own means to figure out the route back home. Roppongi is pretty core with a lot of serious hustlers working the scene. The sun comes up around 4:30 in Tokyo and the bars stay open all night. You can come in on the subway at midnight, party till 5 and then hop back on the subway home. Luckily we've been on the subways so much the past few days that we can navigate them with tired blurry vision now.
Turn a stack of cash into a pile of change? Ropongi will do that to you in just a couple hours. Luckily we had socked a bit away before we went out, otherwise we'd been right back to square one this morning. This is what was in my pockets this morning and all over my bed... wtf??
After last night, we decided to pull out of Shin-Okubo and get a bit nicer hotel in another part of Tokyo. Nick lobbied for a pool at this one, and we managed to find one that was within budget...
We did a bit of the touristy stuff... pretty amazing monastery just down the street from the hotel. Looking over my shoulder as I type this, RawDawg and Welzie are fast asleep... looks like it's a rest night before we travel to Yokohama tomorrow to set up for the Greenroom festival. Lookn forward to it. :) -Carl
