2. Deep Fried Cock China-style (aka immaturity and gambling)

The hotel we are staying at in Tokyo is right next to this weird building:

Yes, Cocoon Tower, those support beams do make your butt look big.

Tokyo is by far the biggest city I've ever been to, with 13.5 million people.  The next runners up are New York and Lima with 8.5 million each.  Unfortunately, we are in the hotel most of the time for mandatory orientation activities, so I didn't get to visit too many things in Tokyo. The first night we were there, four of us go out on the town.  Tokyo has tons of back alleyways that look like this:

Sometimes cars drive down roads like this, surprisingly.  Unsurprisingly, it is awkward and they are difficult to avoid.

We find a cheap place to eat (restaurants in Japan seem much less expensive than those in the US) that had pictures on the menu and questionable English translations of the other items.  The six pictures look like:

1) ramen with a bowl of rice on the left side

2) ramen with a bowl of rice on the right side

3) ramen with a bowl of half rice, half red sauce

4) ramen with a bowl of 3/4 rice, 1/4 red sauce

5) bigger bowl of ramen, smaller bowl of rice

6) smaller bowl of ramen, bigger bowl of rice

And some people say there's not enough variety at ramen restaurants.  psssh!  I'm not that hungry because of the quesadillas and sandwiches listed in the last post, some of which I had stowed in the minifridge of the hotel room.  So I take a look at the poorly translated appetizers, of which my favorite is "Deep Fried Cock China-style" which I order for obvious reasons.  They almost seem intentionally misspelled; "dumpling" is spelled four different ways on the first page alone.

Later, one of the more shy guys we are with suggests that we all try something that we are uncomfortable with tonight.  Not sure what he's getting at (still not sure!), I say, "well I've never gambled officially!"  So we head to a Pachinko parlor.

Slot machines set up to look like a pinball game.

None of us really speaks Japanese, so an attendant comes over to help us because we are confused foreigners.  I try to put one dollar into the machine, but he says I need about 10 dollars.  Reluctantly I feed my money in, knowing I probably will never see it again.  He tries to explain it, but when I try he winces as I literally throw my tokens down the drain at the bottom of the machine.  We all give it a whirl and end up with about 41 cents of tokens at the end, which I make sure to collect a prize with.  Yay!  We won styrofoam "chocolate pie" candy!  My night is complete.  We then went to a bar and had some beer and played darts, which was not as interesting but it was more fun.

That's my first night in Tokyo!  If this gets too long-winded, let me know (or just unfriend me on facebook or something).

Photo credits (in order): free-d.nl, pixelhub.org, bbc.com