Three weeks in Japan

So you're passing from a pretty normal side street in Ueno after a good meal at 11pm, and all the doors seem either closed or on the verge of closing. Then out of nowhere you see 5 girls taking photos of each other and making a bit of a noise. Quite an attention grabber no? That's what happened to us. The girls were wearing kimonos and Brian thought of taking a picture with these girls. Not a bad idea at all - at the time it sounded a good way of showing our relatives and friends that "hey we're in japan!". So we ended up taking pictures with these girls, who turned out to be chinese actually. So that's not exactly a japanese experience..

At some point, I asked one of the girls (who seemed much better at communicating in english than the rest), about what they're doing around at this hour. After all, it seemed quite strange that these "students" were out at this hour partying. She told me that they were at this bar - and I asked about the bar - "any good?" - answered with "alcohol". Like hmm .. ok - that's always a good answer. Since they saw that we were interested, they asked us if we would like to join them inside and, not knowing what was in store for us, we agreed. They took us by the hand, and in a blink of an eye we were inside a small cosy bar sitting by a small table. A lady by the bar seemed to know the girls - in fact she spoke to them and the result was a whiskey bottle in the middle of the table. So it was Brian, I, a whiskey bottle and a few chinese girls ... in Japan of course.

But that's not the whole story - they asked us 10,000 yen (lm30), which is a bit more expensive than we were hoping. Ofcourse we protested that we only wanted one drink, not a whole bottle. That's when the truth emerged - the 10,000 yen is not for the alcohol, but for 1 hour of company. The 1 hour of company wouldn't have been as bad, if it wasn't the case that none of the girls could have a proper flowing conversation in english. In fact, trying to reach an agreement was very difficult due to constant communication breakdowns. After a lot of discussion, the girls agreed that we were not advised before that we'll have to pay for their company or that the price was 10,000 yen. We went out without paying nothing - not even for a glass of whiskey that they poured for us. That was pretty good actually.

As soon as we got out, we saw other girls in front of other bars taking photos of each other with either a mobile or a digital camera.. deja vu!