le fish market

A rainy day in good ol Yono. It’s been an interesting few days. Last Saturday I got to work, looked at the schedule and apparently I’m an elementary school teacher, I found myself having to teach 5 kid classes. 2 groups and 3 man to man. I never look forward to Saturday’s at work, there are always too many kids to teach but this shift put me over the edge. I was not a happy camper. Then, to top it all off, one of my co-workers was sick on Sunday so I found myself having to teach his two kid classes as well. Don’t get me wrong, teaching kids can be really quite refreshing here and there but 5 lessons in one day is just too much.

I got home on Sunday evening, vented to Matt and my roommates and drank a couple of stiff vodkas. After some food and a little relaxation Matt and I headed into Tokyo for an all nighter. We took the last train to Shimbashi station and walked around for a couple of hours killing time before going to Tsukiji fish market. There’s something so surreal about walking around the city of Tokyo at 3am. It’s like being in a different world. Sleep deprivation does funny things to the mind and so does the Ginza district. Ginza is about 3 times the size of Yorkville and has every high end brand name store imaginable. 3 floor Prada, Louis Vuitton, Bvulgari etc. Basically if you pick up any fashion magazine and open to one of its many ads you will find the store in Ginza. Matt made a funny remark that rings very true, many stores contain la, le and chez in their names. French articles = posh. The best thing we noticed was a certain coffee shop. I go to Doutour coffee shop most mornings on my way to work. Doutour is exactly like Coffee Time, practically the same colour scheme the same tasting coffee and atmosphere. Well, in Ginza they changed the name to Le Doutour and the font is different too, kinda dainty like it’s been written with a fancy French feather pen. We didn’t see the interior but it probably has big comfortable sofas where people can sip on their café au laits, read le cosmopolitan, or have les conversations with les amis. So bizarre.

Ginza was quite a contrast to Shimbashi where we saw a lot of sex shops and various people sleeping in the streets. Some people were homeless, other people looked like business men who had missed their last train or had been kicked out of the house. Cabs kept following us around as we desperately tried to find ourselves an internet café to rest our tired feet. We settled for a trusty Yoshinoya restaurant instead where we ordered some beef on rice.

A strange thing happened around 3:30am. We looked up at the sky and there appeared to be some kind of strobe light show going on in the distance. We thought perhaps there was some sort of outdoor concert going on. Matt thought it might be lightening but it was way too frequent and there was no thunder. Anyways, we finally found a clearing between a couple of buildings and watched the most amazing lightening storm we had ever seen. The sky was clear above us, there was a full moon, but only a few blocks ahead there was a sky like something out of the 1988 Demi Moore movie The Seventh Sign. My arm hair was standing on end; it was exciting and quite frightening.

After watching for about 15 minutes we walked around a little bit more then hopped in a cab to Tsukiji Market. It was huge and bustling with fishermen setting up for the morning market. We walked around the small fish market area which was pretty crazy. We had to watch our backs everywhere we went to avoid getting hit by small transport vehicles. The drivers were relentless. We tried to sneak a peek at the large fish auction area but they were setting up behind closed doors. All we managed to see was about 2 minutes of people hulling huge frozen tuna out of a truck and dragging them along the floor to display them for potential bidders. Smoke from the ice was looming along the wet ground as the fishermen milled about sporting gumboots and loose overalls. I tried to take a photo but a small man wielding a large hook started waving his arms in protest so I backed off and then a large orange door came down with a boom.

The large fish auction starts around 5:30 and it was only 4:30. We were tired, it was a little smelly and the storm had finally landed above us so it was time to go home. We took a cab back to the station and caught the first train back to Yono.

We woke up around 1:30, did some grocery shopping, made a greasy breakfast, watched a sci fi movie called Event Horizon, some sumo wrestling on the tele followed by TheTriplets of Belleville. It was a nice lazy day.

Listening to Mylo Destroy Rock & Roll