I am recovering from an exaughsting day of walking and sightseeing. As Jake has mentioned on his blog, it is really hard to find people who understand English here. It’s impossible to find a menu in English anywhere, every meal includes the interesting and sometimes frightening combintaion of guessing and pointing. You choose an item, based on a picture, and if you’re lucky you get chicken instead of liver, which I ordered the first day.

I vistited a couple temples yesterday, one of them Asakusa. On your way up the the temple you have to wash your hands and mouth to clean yourself before you enter.

Many people choose to shake a box filled with wooden sticks that contain a Japanese word that you match up with a certain drawer that contains your fortune. If you receive a fortune that you don’t want to come true, you tie it on one of the many lines that are nearby. I decided to tie mine, it was pretty brutal.

We went searching for a place to ring in the New Year tonight and settled on the area of Roppongi. We spent a significant time in this area last night which can best be described as the Las Vegas of Tokyo. We went to a place called GasPanic, which was filled with hip-hop loving individuals that new every word to every 50 Cent song played, but couldn’t speak or understand much English when you talked with them.

Just before heading to GasPanic, as the day was beginning to wear on all of us, we walked down a small little hill into the city. I noticed neon on a bar from a distance, that appeared to say Milwaukee. Sure enough we walked the spiral staircase down to a basement bar called Bar Milwaukee. It was a pretty nice place and passed our time playing foosball.

Roppongi got the best of us, and we soon realized that we had forgotten that the last subway train left at 1am. We raced through the subway system to arrive just in time to catch the last train back home, or so we thought. It dropped us off about halfway, and completely out of walking distance. We had to take a surprisingly inexpensive cab ride the remaining couple of miles. I swear at times that cab driver was pushing 120 miles per hour.

Tonight we are going to be ringing in the New Year at a place called Velfarre. The place features Trance/Hard House/Techno, which isn’t really indie rock, but I think it will be a blast judging from the sneak peak we got at the place last night.

This morning I realized how much I really enjoy Modest Mouse’s latest album, “Good News For People Who Like Bad News.” It’s been a long time since I’ve listened to it, but it sounded almost perfect today.

I’m sorry these pictures are so small, I got a new version of WordPress, and don’t know how to resize the images.