Salsa and Hail Mary

Saturday night I went to a Salsa club in Roppongi. Roppongi is the party town of Tokyo. There are lots of foreigners there so it feels like home. We got to the salsa club early because apparently they did free salsa lessons before hand. All the salsa lessons in the world couldn't help most of us but oh well. The club was pretty small and covered in very stereotypical mexican/cuban decorations. The people that worked there were cuban so it felt like Texas again hearing people speak spanish. After the lessons the club started playing all this mexican rap. I'm not sure where salsa is exaclty from but I didn't think it was from Mexico. Then the mexican rap would include some american rap with a salsa remix. All in all it was a pretty funny experience. There were also a few creepy old men there that kept on asking the girls to dance...

After the salsa club we went to another club in Roppongi called club 911. Mainly because it had free cover charge. When we got in, we figured out why. It was packed full of people. You basically couldn't move. When we finally got out of the club about 20 minutes later, the bouncer told us to go to another club across the street. Roppongi kind of felt like 6th street on Austin after that. People kept on yelling out "free cover" or the prices for their drinks.

We ended up going to a pretty nice karaoke club after that. I forgot to mention that the whole night there were two japanese girls from Hosei that were showing us around. And they had heard how I sang the Kinki Kids (a terrible Japanese pop group like the backstreet boys) last week, and wanted me to sing it again. Of course I did an encore. Karaoke lasted until 5 am and we caught the first train back. I ended up having to show one of the british guys that had come with us how to get back to his stop on the train. It felt pretty good considering it was the first time I had actually enough knowledge to get myself back to my stop and also able to tell someone else how to navigate the trains.

Then last night was a birthday party for a guy named Yousuke and they found out it was my birthday today so they included me in on the festivities. We went to this place called "Christon Cafe" in Shinjuku. It was this resturaunt that was modeled after a traditional European church. In the middle of the big open space they had a huge golden altar with statues of the madonna, Jesus and the saints. In the opening corridor there were greek icons on the walls and chairs with naked ladies on them. The japanese concept of church is a bit skewed I'm guessing..haha. Where we sat it kind of felt like a mueseum because they had little spaces in the wall covered by glass and relics inside. They were pretty random too. On one side of the wall they had (in order in different spaces in the wall) a saint, a painting of Jesus, a disco ball, a statue of the madonna, a statue of jesus and a huge diamond. This is Rachel and I next to a priests outfit I guess.


We had this lavish meal of hors d'oeuvre like plates. It was all really good. Although most of the time we had no idea what it was. It was supposed to be european, mainly Italian, but that was debatable. One really good thing we had was a pizza with slices of salmon on top. It sounds terrible, but it was actually really good.

After the meal me and Yousuke had a surprise of 2 massive, extravagant cakes. They weren't really too terribly large but for japanese sizes, they were huge. Plus they had fresh fruit all around them. Something you never see a lot of in Tokyo.
There was some type of posh candy thing on top that I couldn't figure out. If you can see it (and read japanese) it says my name in the corner.

After the birthday party some people were going out again but a lot of us decided to go back and sleep since most of us had been out all weekend and had school today. Which I have later on today...