Let’s see, where was I with my adventures? Oh yeah, my date with Marcia! We met up in Shibuya to find a nice place to have lunch. Although we were supposed to meet at 1 o’ clock at Hachiko, Marcia ran into some public transportation problems, so I waited for her at starbucks, where she arrived about an hour late…

We quickly left starbucks to have lunch at a small Brazilian place Marcia had spotted riding the bus. However, remembering where she exactly spotted the bar proved to be quite a problem (go female sense of direction . So we ended up walking around for about 2 hours searching for the place, until we decided to have lunch in another place.

While walking around we, of course, spoke about lots of things. Her father was Japanese, so she is half Japanese, half Brazilian. She grew up in Brazil, but has been living and working in Japan for quite a while now. She also mentioned fairly quickly she has a boyfriend, so that made it crystal clear what kind of date this was . The afternoon was very pleasant and we spoke about a lot of stuff.

At the end of the afternoon we hugged goodbye and that was, as they say, that. So I’m sorry to disappoint you guys, no wicked Brazilian adventures (yet . We are keeping in touch though and went out again yesterday with some of her friends to check out the hanami (cherry blossom parties) at Asakusa. Stay tuned for that adventure…

The next day was a Sunday and, since I had heard about the wicked things going on at Yoyogi park on Sunday, Michel and I decided to go and check it out. Although we were there a little bit later than planned, we still got to see plenty of fun stuff. All of it started of course by a quick view of the cosplayers gathered at the bridge outside Harajuku station.

Unfortunately most of the cosplayers already left for other places, since we were a bit late, so we quickly continued on to the park to see if we could find the rock and roll dancers. Fortunately they were very hard to miss, as just past the Harajuku bridge the various “gangs” gather up to show off their moves to the world. Each group had their own colors of clothing, but everybody had the same rock and roll style in their outfits. Very fun to see .

But it is even better to see some of them in action of course!

After the rock n roll dancers it started to dawn on me that this place felt kind of like our yearly Queensday party, only smaller. We were walking around the place, watching various bands perform on the side of the streets. Street vendors selling their junk vintage items, food stands selling food; very nice this weekly mini festival! It almost felt like home .

When we continued on to the park we were first treated with a stunning view of the park from the walk bridge along the road.

Quickly followed by the stunning view of a dance class rehearsing next to the stairs we came down from. While that was plain funny, the Japanese hippies sitting around in drum circles, continuously playing their beats, were simply awesome!

The park itself was vast and very nice. A lot of people were walking around, couples were having dates, kids (and grandpa’s) were flying kites, people playing catch, you get the drift. However, it was still a bit dusty, since it wasn’t even spring then. I absolutely have to go and see this park again this week, now the sakura trees are in full bloom!

We stayed in the park for about an hour, studying and watching the people passing by. Then we decided it was about time to head on home. On our way home we got treated by two excellent people: Super ehm… Beerbelly man and Predator. providing us with the perfect closure of this amazing day at Yoyogi park.

I’ll definitely visit this marvelous place again!