… At the gaybar, gaybar!

But, before that, I had to check out Igrushka perform at a tiny venue with a big name, Manhole. Situated near Ikebukuro station, starting bands can perform here. But whoever came up with the name for it, certainly didn’t know a lot about the English language. That aside, Igrushka had a very nice show again, although the other bands that performed this night had very nice sets as well. Very skilled musicians, and fun stage moves. Although they were a bit too studied for a “true rock experience,” but hey, this is Japan.

After the show, me and Artem hurried to Shinjuku as fast as we could, because over there it was time for a good old evening of, you guessed it, karaoke baby! This time we were with a small group, so we had a small karaoke room as well. We didn’t have as much room to move, but the atmosphere inside was nice and cozy. And we had some wicked projections going on on the walls.

We had an awesome karaoke night, with Sam singing beautiful Japanese songs (fluently), and Artem singing Billy Jean in an hilarious way. We even sang staying alive, by the Beegees and Michel and Chie sang the tonari no Totoro (my neighbor Totoro) theme song. But after karaoke, we found ourselves in quite the predicament. We were in Shinjuku, had missed last train to go to another party area, and had no clue on where to go.

Well, that’s not quite true, Sam had a deep knowledge of the clubs in this area, but these were all gay clubs. So after a long time of standing around doing nothing, we decided to go ahead and follow Sam into a gay club. I had never been to a gay bar before, so I must admit I was quite curious about what we would find in there. We went to a club that was packed with men (obviously) and ordered our drinks.

The first thing I noticed was that the men working there were all very nice and “fabulous” (wink, wink). The second thing I noticed was that it was just a club like any other, only the women / men ratio was severely against us. Of course we encountered the typical “fags” who dance with their hand bent, and their ass out , but that was only to be expected. Fortunately our view was brightened up a little by two gorgeous girls making out all the time, right in front of us.

All in all, we had quite some fun in there, but after a while we decided it was time for a change of scenery and went off to get some beers at the Hub. At the Hub we drank some beer towers and ate some food, after which we decided to go look for a place to play some pool, until the trains would start running again. We were walking around, looking for a suitable place, when all of a sudden, Hellooooo Kitty! So pool was off, time to take pictures .

The next day I spent working, but in the evening I was going out to meet up with Swaroop and Joy in Shinjuku. We were supposed to meet at 10.30 at the Hachiko statue. But they showed up around 11, finding me waiting for them for a long while, frozen to the bone. They brought Joy’s friend Nyree along as well, and we were also joined by Artem. Swaroop had also invited a Japanese friend, who turned out to be a very cool, hip Shibuya dude and he brought a friend as well. So then we could finally go off and try to find someplace warm and get ourselves a drink!

We went to a small bar, where they had cheap drinks (300 Yen for a beer) and a lot of foreigners. We met some American guys there, who ended up chugging beer down our throats. Of course I kept our Dutch pride safe, and chugged the beer without a flinch, pff Americans . We stayed in that place quite a while, so when we left, we were all pretty wasted. Time to go to the next place!

We went to a club, which had an indie rock night that night, which turned out to be a very nice change from the electronic music I have been hearing in all the clubs lately. Bernd, you would be so proud, I actually liked the music a lot. We ended up creating a tiny moshpit with a couple of dudes, which left me with my face bleeding (slightly) and Swaroop all black and blue. It was great .

Then, while I was talking to Joy, she told me that Nyree had dared her to kiss me and if I wanted to do that. Who could say no to that . so we ended up kissing on top of the stairs, for the whole club to see. Saves explaining things later on, I guess. We went home together, but before we got there, we of course took the wrong train. After about 15 minutes of riding it (the train!), we got off only to find we had just made it to Shinjuku, and somehow bumped into Swaroop and Nyree there. We took Nyree with us, and left for Noborito, where Joy lives.

We had a very nice Sunday the day after, which unfortunately was brutally disrupted by the fact that I really had to work again. But all in all, yet again a very nice weekend in Tokyo!

Tags: hachiko, karaoke, party, shibuya, shinjuku

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.