Hit the clubs last night, with my sister and her girl friend, the French baker.
It rained the entire evening, and Shibuya was a sea of transparent plastic umbrellas. I’m not much of a clubber, but Gaspanic was a nice place to hang out, in spite of (or perhaps, due to) the fact that they had somehow managed to cram 80 people into a space the size of my apartment back home. I learned some things about how the Japanese males move in these places, mostly from observing the 2 dozen or so propositions my two companions thumbed their noses at throughout our stay there. (Unfortunately, the Japanese females are nowhere near that forward.)
300 decibels later and it’s Saturday noon. Time to visit the Apple Store in Ginza, hooray! Didn’t matter if I already had every Apple-related product I needed for the foreseeable future; this was a visit of obligation. (Interesting tidbit about the building itself: the elevators in this 4-storey Mac monolith don’t have any buttons. You just step inside and let Apple take you where it wants you to go.)
Two blocks down the road was the Sony Building, which showcased some of the bleeding-edge gear from Japan’s biggest consumer electronics manufacturer. It didn’t seem particularly interesting until I rounded a corner on the 4th level and saw a crowd of people packed around a small glass case. It was the Rolly, an egg-shaped music device foretold by the wise men. I watched it flash and spin and sparkle, and came to realize that that was what I was in Japan to buy.
The Sony reps gave us the expected perfunctory warnings about how the device wasn’t meant for sale outside of Japan, and as such had no English manual or software. Of course, by the time the dude had finished talking my money was already in his hands, so it was a moot point. The Rolly cost JPY37,900, a little more than you would pay for an 8gb iPod Touch. It’s neither the best music player or portable speaker I’ve ever used, but it’s certainly the cutest. One could make the argument that it was the Pamela Anderson of music devices, but that ignores the fact that the Rolly is actually quite brilliant. I’ll write a more detailed entry about this later on, but suffice to say that I managed to get it working with no manual and software that wasn’t even Mac-compatible.
For dinner, we went to Alcatraz+ER, a theme restaurant in Shibuya. The whole place is decorated in the style of a prison-hospital, complete with handcuffs for the guests and jail cells instead of tables or booths. The “hospital” part of the theme was mainly just so they could dress their waitresses up as hot nurses, I guess.
Single best feature: after our first hour there, all the lights go out and a menacing face appears in the various TV screens mounted on the walls. After growling some (unfortunately for me) unintelligible threats at his dumbstruck audience, the lights come back up in discotheque mode, and the prison is transformed into the set of the Munsters. One of the male nurses runs around the restaurant singing in what I can only describe as a J-Pop rendition of Rocky Horror Picture Show. He’s followed by an escaped inmate who tries to scare the guests, who is in turn pursued by a female nurse with a gun. Then, just to make sure you get the idea, Michael Myers comes along armed with two decidedly anachronistic six-shooters and starts blowing everyone away. If you can think of a more bizarre dinner venue, I’d love to hear about it.
