I think I look too Japanese for my own good as all the locals start speaking to me in Japanese and freak out when I answer back with a helpless look on my face and start muttering out english phrases. I managed to catch a limousine bus (not a prestigious as the name mightsound) from Narita International Airport into Tokyo and then hail a cab to my hotel. two fairly big accomplishments and not a word of Japanese except "arigato gozaimsu."
The minute I arrived at the hotel, I got a call from my friends Fredrik and Sylvi who brought me to a "contemporary performance art show" at this great advertising firm/art gallery at the invitation aof a friend and her husband who's an artist. It was, interesting, to say the very least. one of the performances included a naked man guzzling a bottle of wine while being flogged with whips and barbed wire by a girl in a house coat. and that was probably one of the less risqué performances! One of the other ones was a guy sitting atop a ladder, unzipping his pants, and sipping on a long straw which was held to his genitals while a video camera played the close-up on a screen behind him. Not even after an hour after I arrived in Tokyo,
this is what I was introduced to. Needless to say, we didn't stay long and instead moved to a cool little bar down the street called "Lether Bar" which was owned by a Spanish ex-pat.
After a few drinks and meeting some friends of friends, we went out to a Chinese restaurant and had some Peking duck (delicious) and chinese sherry (absolutely horrendous!). The restaurant was in Roppongi Hills, which is now a cleaned up, more European part of town, but which used to be the red-light district. Appropriately enough, the restaurant is decorated with giant phalluses on the walls, as well as breasts aplenty, and at the bar, an oversized bell carved with a very large vagina looms above diners.
And this was all in the first night.
This is going to be one hell of an trip!
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