I left Alex's house late in the morning after setting up final arrangements to open my New Zealand bank account. Thinking I might try to find some more stickers to send back home, I headed to Senodai, a 6 floor art supply store in Shinjuku. While I was there, I also ended up getting some stationery to write home to Jess and my family with.
From there, I went to the North end of the Imperial Gardens, stopping for a quick lunch at an Udon and Tonkatsu restaurant. I had some chicken with mayonnaise on rice with a bowl of hot udon noodles. Some other European and/or American tourists came in while I was there, and I felt proud that I had handled ordering food with the ticket system better than they had. Like a vending machine, you put money in and it gives you a ticket for your order, which you hand to the staff. I had no problem with that...though they did have to show me a menu before I could figure out that they were asking me about my choice of side dishes.
When I was done with lunch, I headed to the Imperial Gardens and started a long long walk through them, stopping to check out some crows taking a bath in a water feature. I went past a concert arena that had lots of young women lining up to see a boy band, and then went into the Imperial Palace itself. The grounds were huge, and I still don't have a good sense of their scale. I eventually exited, and then walked along the exterior for what seemed like ever before I reached the end of them.
I decided to pass through the Ginza district in search of the Tsukiji fish markets, and found the Ginza to be strangely reminiscent of New York City. Apparently a lot of American tourists say the same thing about it. It had to do with the way the streets and the buildings were arrayed like a grid, I think, and the way that the buildings were of a generally uniform height and style. Somehow it was the only part of Japan that had the right density of structures arranged in straight lines to create the impression of being in Manhattan.
I got to Tsukiji at the absolute worst time. It was about 3:30 and there was no market to speak of. The few shops that still had open doors were all cleaning up and about to close. All the other buildings were shuttered, and the streets were totally quiet. It was really terrible timing, and I'll never have another chance to see it there and have the freshest sushi in the world considering that the market is about to close down and reopen in a totally different part of the city. Although maybe my experience was just a poetical expression of what the market is going through right now.
With a lot more time left to kill before Alex got of work, I went to the nearby Hamarikyu Gardens, which were established by a shogun, and found a place to sit. My feet were aching at that point, so I only took a little time to walk around and take pictures of bugs, birds, and the landscaping, which was framed by towers on most sides.
The gardens closed at 5, so I went out and tried to find Shimbashi station and take a train to the climbing gym where I was gonna meet Alex and others at 7. That ended up being unexpectedly complicated, and then I had some trouble getting directions to the climbing gym. Eventually I tried to get help from Alex, who told me to head to the Akiba station. There is no place called Akiba in Tokyo on the maps, so I used some of my precious little mobile roaming data for additional help. Turns out Akiba is short for the Akihabara neighborhood.
In Akiba I wandered around electric town and turned down offers to go into maid cafes, where some men go to pay women to talk to them. I wasn't feeling very comfortable there, so I found a river and walked up and down it, trying to take pictures in the dark of the buildings on the opposite banks, which had much nicer designs on the riverside than on their streetsides.
Eventually, Alex, Audrey, Ivar, and Canyon met me at B-Pump Climbing Gym, and we went in for an evening of bouldering. I don't know if there is a standard Japanese rating system for bouldering problems, but the one this gym used was totally different from the one I'm familiar with in North America. Besides that, all of the routes were built in a way that felt totally foreign to me. It's like they expected the climber to tackle each problem with a fundamentally different approach from that used in the American gyms I've climbed in. They were all very interesting to work through, but I wasn't able to solve very many of them.
The best part of the gym was the third floor, which had low lighting and had deep blue accent lights built into the climbing wall itself. It felt like climbing around in an alien cave or spaceship. I only happened to get pictures taken in one of the few well lit areas, so this photo doesn't do the room justice at all:
After we were all exhausted, we walked to Kanda station to a Chicago style pizza place, which had some really good local stout that managed to be perfectly malty and chocolatey. The 'Chicago pizza' was delicious, and a good attempt, but it didn't hold up to my standards for real Chicago style pizza. Specifically, the pizza stubbornly held its edges when we cut into and lifted it out onto our plates. You could practically eat it with your hands. I don't think that should be possible with Chicago pizza; the cheese and the sauce should ooze out of the slice once you cut it and barely hold any form, forcing you to eat with fork and knife. But it's been 10 years since I visited Chicago, so maybe I'm not remembering it correctly at all.
Sadly we all had to go eventually, and I said goodbye to my new climbing buddies on the train. Alex and I headed back on our own, giving each other some intense Game of Thrones trivia questions. We continued the quiz show as we did laundry, and we took turns playing Overwatch on Alex's computer until everything was dry. Or at least, mostly dry. Some of my clothes needed a bit more time, but I'd already spent some of Alex's money on an unnecesary wash cycle at the laundromat by accident, so I didn't ask for any more of his spare change. We finally got to sleep around 1:30 in the morning.
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