Shibuya Dance Party

I was pretty surprised to find out that the trains in Japan stop running at around midnight. As a result, if you go out, you pretty much have to make the decision to go home early or party all night. I usually choose the latter. My first time doing this was at Club Air in Shibuya.

I met up with some people from Meetup.com's Tokyo Electronic Music Lover's group one Saturday night and had a great time. From my station, it takes about and hour by train and about $14 US roundtrip. I arrived in Shibuya several hours early just to check things out. Near Hachiko, the famous dog statue where everybody meets up before beginning their evening out, I met a bunch of Germans and we hung out for awhile. It seems to be much easier to meet new friends in Japan than back in America. After asking them a quick question to confirm exactly where I was, we were telling jokes and chain smoking and talking about life in Japan.

I later met up with the people from the group and we headed down several dark streets to get to Club Air. The club cost 3,000 Yen to get into, which is roughly $30 US. We got there at around 11:30pm and the place was packed. The venue was a little too small for dancing and I don't think there was any air conditioning. After a couple hours of trying to dance to some pretty bad trance, we hit the chillout room upstairs for awhile. At around 2 or 3am the place started to clear out so there was plenty of more room to dance and luckily the next DJ played much better music.

We left Club Air at about 5 or 6am when the trains started running again and everyone was completely exhausted. I think the club was in a semi-residential part of Shibuya because there were people on every block for quite awhile whose job it was to make sure nobody talked. Anything above the softest whisper would get you an angry look and a "Shh!" yelled at you by some guy.

We all went to a family restaurant and had some of the worst food I've ever tasted in my entire life. I ordered eggs which came out looking like chunky yellow water. After telling the waiter that my food was cold, he took it away, and brought it back 2 minutes later the exact same temperature. We all made fun of the people sleeping all around us, but shortly after I passed out as well.

We stayed at the restaurant for quite sometime, and then everybody caught their train home. I finally made it home hours later and was completely disoriented from the lack of sleep. My apartment is a solid 20 minute walk from the closest train station which doesn't work out too well during these kind of nights.

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