Tickets are purchased and I am ready to go.

I'm leaving tomorrow for Seoul, South Korea to pick up my new visa. My plane leaves from Narita International Airport at 12:55 tomorrow afternoon and I'll be touching down at Seoul Incheon International at about 3:30 or so. I will then navigate the Seoul train system to the home of my couchsurfing hostess, a nice Canadian girl named D. We'll go out for delicious Korean BBQ for dinner and then maybe a couple of drinks afterward.

Last night I went out in Tokyo and ended up, for some godforsaken reason, in Shimokitazawa. We started out at a nice bar in Ueno, and although it was nothing special, it at least had people in it...and a nice, non-cockroach infested ambiance (keep reading). One of my drinking partners for the evening decided that this scene was lame and that we should head out to Shimokita.

OK, big mistake. There is fuck-all in Shimokitazawa for nightlife. In fact, sadly, there's vastly more nightlife in my tiny hometown in Iowa than there is in this small Tokyo enclave. We ended up in a tiny, dingy, shitty little second floor bar. The big attraction, apparently, is the owner's record collection and the fact that he will take requests. OK, great. Fantastic. My new acquaintance, whose idea it was to go to Shimokita and the bar, neglected to tell us that the bar was also heavily infested with cockroaches. After I'd killed one with my beer glass and spotted another on the wall, I none-too-politely insisted that we get the fuck out of there. When the owner cheerfully brought the bill over, we were startled to notice that we'd apparently been screwed. I paid over $10US for one beer in a cockroach infested shithole.

Anyway, we then went to an izakaya (Japanese-style bar) and had a couple of beers and a lot of food. That cheered me up, but it still wasn't particularly stimulating. My roommate, Andrew, and I ended up on our own after the others went home and proceeded to stake out a room in a karaoke parlor. We sang bad karaoke for the next 2 hours, then caught the 5am train back to Ichikawa, and finally crashed around 7.

Soooo, anyway. Hopefully my exploits in Korea will be more amusing for me and less amusing for people who like hearing stories about me failing to have a good time. I do have an increasing stockpile of funny Tokyo stories, though, only a few of which are making it into this blog. I'll try to be more diligent. Korea update in a few days...