To be honest the subway map is one of the most intimidating thing for a tourist to look at. Luckily we had Alex. John and I woke up at about 8am to start showering and we made a trip up the street to get some food from the market. The instant food there was really quite delicious, which is hard for someone from America to grasp but Japan has found a way to balance convince and quality. Around 1pm Alex finished his class and came to meet us. We headed to the train station and headed to Ikabukaro to meet some of Alex's friends all of whom were foreign exchange students he had met in his foreign exchange dorm. Quite a few of them spoke English and any who didn't Alex communicated with in Japanese.
We met two Korean Girls that Alex introduced as the Crazy Koreans who's names were given to me but as of now I can't recall but Alex assured me we would have to at least once go to Karaoke with because it was an experience we would never forget. Some of the other people we met were from countries like Australia, Germany, France and America. The one guy from France we met was quite a fun guy to just bullshit with and quite welcoming. The other American's name was Alex so for sake of not getting confused I will refer to her as Las Vegas Alex or LV Alex. LV Alex then joined our group as her and one other person had a reservation at a tattoo shop that Alex Dimmick had agreed to visit.
The appointment for the tattoo shop was at 7pm and we had about 4 hours to kill until then so we hopped a train to another part of town and started to explore the different shops and festival like side streets. The sun here goes down around 4pm which sounds kind of lame but really the city is so brightly illuminated that it makes no difference. We visited a 6 story building called BIC camera which was a massive 6 story display of all the latest and greatest electronics. Obviously I was like a kid in a candy store having to stop and examine all of these new things, which most of the time lead to the group getting ahead of me and then getting separated. After our excursion through there we went to a huge mall like area called Sunshine City which I thought was an odd name considering you go underground to enter the building. It was odd to see so many American shops mixed in with some really cool Japanese fashion stores. We grabbed a quick meal and headed to the station to make our way to the tattoo shop.
We made it there; though, a little late and met up with Alex's German friend named Tugbe (pronounced Tuba) and we headed to tattoo shop. This tattoo artist was known for his traditional Japanese style and his shop well reflected the cultural time period his art was accustom too. Tuba had intended to get a tattoo there and LV Alex was there to gather some information for a paper on Japanese fasion and by extension tattoos. They staid and talked for a while then we left Tuba to discus her tattoo design and our group made our way into town and explored our way through some side streets and small shops. We all got tired and hopped our respective trains and made it home.
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