Swallowtailed Shopping - Week 7 (June 24-June 30)

Swallowtailed Shopping

Week 7

Happy Canada Day everyone! I'll toast your Alexander Keith's or what have you with my Sapporo! I look forward to being present for all the Barbecues and merrymaking next year!

Now that the formalities of being a canuck are out of the way, it's down to business.



Last week was pretty much all around average. Nothing really crazy happened, just business as usual. Actually, really nothing at all remarkable happened during the work week. The most amazing thing that occurred was that I ate a nice Florida grapefruit on Friday morning. I guess that was unusual. You'd think you'd be able to grow em' in Japan, but I guess not. Lack of space perhaps? Nice to taste a bit of North America though.

Saturday.

Once again, a night for clubbing. Maybe it's getting a little boring at this point to hear about these trips out to the various establishments that offer drinking and dancing at a price that does not even inhabit the same galaxy as 'reasonable'. Here's at least one more for you though. The biggest one in Asia no less.

Side note: through speaking to a few people over the course of the week I've come to the conclusion that last week's club, Club Asia, may in fact be a Gay club. I don't really know what to say about that other then to shrug my shoulders. I had a great time, no problems and got free drinks. Sounds good to me.

This time, on our third attempt to make it to Ageha, our group finally made it. Only a small party headed out this time though, myself, Melissa and Zoey. We met in Shibuya at 11:30 and by 12:00 were on our way to Ageha via the shuttle that the club runs.

We all shared an amused look when, after the shuttle was full, about 10 more people got on and promptly folded down seats attached to the sides of the chairs in the middle of the aisle. That was one packed bus.

The trip to Ageha was really, really cool. It's a trip riding on those elevated freeways through all the neon. The best part of the trip was crossing Tokyo Bay though.

Wow.

Remember Blade Runner's opening? Well, subtract the flying cars and the belching pillars of fire, and there you have it. The view from the bridge was spectacular. I wish I'd had a chance to get off the bus and just soak it in, but maybe some other time.

We got to the club, but before we got in I got separated from Zoey and Melissa due to my quest for a washroom. I ended up pretending I was with a bunch of French gaijin. The guy closest to me gave me an odd look when I handed my ID over after him, but I used my good old Quebecois to thank him and tell him where I was from. According to him "Ah, Canada! C'est un belle pays!"

Merveilleux.

I made it into the club, after being searched for weapons and drugs. Also, no cameras allowed. I'm glad that my phone has a decent one, otherwise I wouldn't have gotten the two or three videos that I did.

So Ageha (which means swallowtail butterfly) is comprised of three main areas. The main floor itself is pretty large...Maybe about the size of a hockey rink. Insane lighting all over the place and a great sound system. The other two floors are not nearly as good. There's a tent outside that's still about the size of the dance floor at Club Asia, but a little bit rough-hewn on the inside. The last floor area surrounds the pool at the back of the club. Again, not that great. It's kind of small, but still pretty cool. The pool and deck looks out over Tokyo bay though, and that's very impressive. It was also pretty awesome to be dancing away at 5 AM in the morning in a light rain watching the sky brighten. Too bad that it was a little bit overcast. The club was pretty amazing though, mostly for the main floor. As has been my tradition so far, I worked my way to the front of each dance floor and danced for a bit.

Attention whore?

Maybe.

The music was the only real problem I had with the club. It was all techno, but good techno as far as I could tell. The problem was though that after 5 hours it all started sounding the same. I would have liked to switch up with some hip-hop or something. As far as I can tell the clubs here don't run themed nights like 80's night or Mod night at the clubs in Ottawa. Kind of a shame.

So there were three noteworthy things that occurred over the course of this night.

1. (one) I discovered that around about the time that I drink a Red Bull + Liquor concoction is also around about the time that I REALLY start dancing stupid. All that energy I guess? I have so much fun though, I don't really care. Makes for a really great night, but very painful legs the day afterwards.

2. (two) Towards the end of the night Zoey, Melissa and I migrated away from the main dance floor and hung out at the pool. I'm not entirely sure if pool is really the right name for this thing. Maybe "aquatic advertising billboard." For one, it's not very large, about the same size as an above ground pool back in Canada. Granted, it does have some vodka advertising at the bottom of it (which I'm sure was very costly to procure), which might be reason enough for it. The weirdest thing was, anytime that someone jumped into the pool, security immediately escorted them out of the club. Which is bizarre. I offered to help a guy out of the pool once and security immediately moved me away from him. It seems as though the pool is just really there to generate trouble, nothing else. Strange. The other unusual event was that for about the last hour of the night this gaijin with scraggly black hair who was quite skinny but still managed to have a pot belly decided that the best thing to do would be to pull off his shirt and stand around like he was a gangster or something. I don't know what he was thinking. What I do know is that that is one of the least flattering things I have ever seen.

3. (three) Around about 2:30 or so they raised a pair of poles in the middle of the main dance floor. These poles were soon occupied and put to good use by a quartet of barely clothed women. It was sort of like a half-assed Cirque Du Soleil mixed with a burlesque show. The girls did some pretty amazing things, but I couldn't really bring myself to stand there for too long, which was kind of funny actually. I was standing there beside Melissa and Zoey looking at this and all I could think about was how lame all the guys standing around in front of the stage looked with their heads craned up into the sky. I really found it objectionable picturing myself as one of those guys. Ugh. Maybe I was just uncomfortable because I was in the company of a couple of women? Honestly, I don't really know. I watched for a few minutes and went back to dancing. It just seemed like too much objectification for me. I did manage to record a quick video before security almost removed me for using a camera. That'll be up on Facebook. I guess it was a pretty spectacle though, and a testament to the size of the largest club in Asia.

We headed home in a gray Tokyo morning still laughing about the unfortunate fellow poolside. I was home by 8 AM and quickly feel asleep.

Sunday was crappy weather all day again. I spent the day doing not much of anything. The night was great though. It was Don's birthday party, about two weeks late, but just as awesome. We went on down to Naka Megura to a place called Junkadelic.

Oh man, you have no idea how good it was to eat quality Mexican Food.

But that's a cop-out, so I'll quantify it for you.

Over the course of a couple hours I had the following:

2 plates of nachos
1 Quesadilla
1 Chicken Chimi-Changa
3 Margeritas on the rocks
2 shots of Tequila.

That's a lot of food for me. And it was all EXCELLENT. I could have eaten more, but I think that's enough for one night.

This was also, coincidentally, my first experience with Tequila shots. How is that possible you ask? I've always been kind of against the concept of shots, and still am. I like to taste my alcohol, and shots really don't let you savor it at all. Still good fun. There were 10 of us there, I think, and the conversation flowed well. We all went our separate ways after dinner.

Monday dawned to pretty nice weather. I headed down to Shibuya for 2:00 and arrived there 1/2 hour late (sorry Melissa and Zoey!). We waited around another 30 minutes for Zoey's friend Becky to show up. Afterwards we ambled our way over to the 109 building and had a nice western lunch. Mine was noodles in a creamy sauce with crab and shrimp. Very good.

After lunch we made our way through the 6 floors of women's clothing stores that are in the 109 building. Really crazy atmosphere and all kinds of shops, from trendy hippy to crazy goth stuff and dress shops. It was really neat and the techno and hip hop pounding from everywhere made me feel I was in a club. Zoey found a great Engrish shirt. Not much else though. It's a pretty intense experience.

Our next stop was the 109-2 building which contains all the Men's stores.

The style here was...different...

I think the best way to describe the men's style in this particular store as Goth/Emo David Bowie circa Ziggy Stardust et. al. Also, I'm not a particular big guy, but I doubt I could fit into a single pair of jeans in that mall.

Pretty trippy to see though. The whole place was filled with fashionistas and whatnot. Very cool.

Our last two stops were the English Book Store at the top of Tower Records and a very cool T-shirt store. I bought some more books, including a new copy of Genki (thanks Bambi, yours was super helpful! I'll return it ASAP). I also picked up a number of T-shirts at the other store, all very interesting designs.

We finished off the day by stopping by American Apparel and discovering it was essentially the same as the stores in Canada. We walked up to Harajuku and had dinner at Shakey's pizza before departing for the homestead.

That was pretty much it for this last week though. Oh, there is this commercial for Triangle Smooth Vodka. I think it's amazing. It tends to play on trains and I crack up every time. In other news I almost had a file cabinet fall on me this morning. That wasn't too much fun. Other then that though, there's another week in the history books.

Talk to you all again, soon.

Ian "Mello Yello" Cantello