G8 Online

With Yuhei back at work, first on our itinerary for today was the somewhat random choice of the Tokyo Beer Museum. Getting there wasn't as easy as we might have hoped - not because of the public transport, of course, but because Fox had the shits and we kept having to get off the train so that he could find a toilet. Eventually, looking a little pale, he was able to complete the journey to Ebisu staion, where we accosted passers-by until we had found the museum.

After all this, it turned out to be closed on Mondays. This was somewhat annoying, but we did seem to be in a nice area, so we headed into the nearby department store, which had a massive food section. We all chose a meal and ate it in an outdoor public area with a load of tables and a fountain, and over this meal decided that Tokyo Tower (essentially a poor man's Eiffel Tower and built purely to attract tourists) wasn't worth visiting. Instead, Fox and DV decided that they fancied a trip up the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building themselves. Sultoon, George and myself had already been there, but Sultoon went with them to direct them to the place while myself and George decided to strike out on our own for a bit of sightseeing for an hour or two.

We were back in the Shinjuku area, so George and I decided to go up another skyscraper. This one housed an art museum containing the original of Van Gogh's "Sunflowers", which had been purchased for a cool five billion yen. Irritatingly enough, this was closed as well - Mondays are apparently days off for Japanese museum staff. We then tried a different building with an observatory just to pass the time, but it only had one small window and was basically rubbish. We still had twenty minutes until we'd agreed to meet the others, so we went back to the Govt. Building to see if we could catch up with them there.

We didn't see them as they'd already left, but we did get some fantastic value which helped to save our morning from being completely wasted : as we headed back down from the observatory, coming out of the lift was none other than John Aldridge! We scarcely had time to acknowledge him, but we were still elated at having seen a second minor celebrity footballer in two days, and caught up with the others to tell them all about it.

Or that's what they thought ... in fact, I am now revealing for the first time that this was all a big sham. We never saw Aldridge at all - we just decided to amuse ourselves by coming up with a plausible celebrity sighting and telling the others about it. This allowed George and I to chortle smugly at one another for the rest of the day as Fox, Sultoon and DV were taken in. Apologies, the three of you, but you have to admit that it was a good con.

Anyway, our attempts at tourism were pretty much over, and we decided to go to a sports bar. The Tokyo Sports Bar hadn't been our cup of tea, so we eventually found a place called "Clubhouse" on a Shinjuku side-street. Run by English and Australian staff, it had a few TV screens showing sport and, of course, football shirts all over the walls, including (bizarrely) an early-90's Coventry City shirt as worn by Mick Quinn.

Eventually we batted out most of the day's football, which was patchily entertaining. Croatia lost 1-0 to Mexico in a fairly dire match, but we only saw the second half of that one; then it was Brazil 2 Turkey 1 (excellent game) and Italy 2 Ecuador 0 (truly awful after the first half hour). The Brazil fan opposite us showed good etiquette by agreeing that Brazil's winning penalty was a bad decision and that Rivaldo's comedy face-clutching antics were an outrage - but then he was Italian-born, like all his mates that turned up before the last match. They were top-grade stioudents, and about a dozen of them sat there having bought about one drink between them, such that eventually the proprietor had to tell them to either buy something or bugger off. They did at least provide a little bit of atmosphere, though.

Halfway through this match Fox strayed into the bathroom and waited for the cubicle (there is a point to this comment, as you'll see). As he was able to see through the crack in the door, he could see that the person in there was standing up, and therefore pissing - so it wouldn't be a long wait. After waiting a little longer, it became clear that something was going on ... the slight shaking of the figure within gave it away ... the punter within had chosen this moment to relieve himself in a different way altogether. As he sheepishly stepped out, eyes downcast, he was told "It's not that good a game mate!"

Fox returned to us with this amusing anecdote; meanwhile, DV, having decided that he couldn't bat out all the football, had gone exploring. It turned out that he'd gone to have a massage ... but before we could make too many assumptions about a trip to Roppongi for some naughtiness, it emerged that he'd been to the Panasonic building, where there was a remarkable auto-massage chair.

Around this stage of the holiday, another running joke reached its peak. Our Japan Rail Passes, which got us free travel on the Yanamote Loop line (the most useful one for getting round Tokyo), had to be shown to the staff at the station ticket gates when entering and leaving stations, since they didn't fit in the automatic machines. However, they were so lax in checking them that simply waving them in the general direction of the staff usually did the trick. Sultoon (who else?) decided to try waving something else entirely, beginning with vaguely similar-looking items like a postcard. Encouraged by his success, he came up with the bright idea of writing on a piece of paper, "THIS IS NOT A JAPAN RAIL PASS", and waving that at the ticket officer. He inevitably heralded this successful venture as "a great con".

A late phone call from Yuhei that evening, complete with female giggling noises in the background, informed us that he had settled his long-running disagreement with the lovely, and that he would be staying elsewhere tonight. For once we'd be getting up earlier than him, though, as we planned a 5.50 start for a big day's tourism. Day 9 >