In the afternoon we went to Hamarikyu. On the weather forecast they had mentioned that peonies were now flowering, and I remembered from last year that Hamarikyu had a peony garden.
As well as checking out the gorgeous blooms we watched an outdoor demonstration of aikido, which made us yearn for martial arts again. Emily had a whale of a time running around under the cherry boughs.
I was trying to find a beetle to show her, as she says the word so often; an earwig was the closest I got, plus lots of big black ants. Setting off for home, Nick noticed an odd sight: some rays and lots of jellyfish in the sea-fed moat around Hamarikyu, coming in on the incoming tide.
I left Nick and Emily in the bath while I went out for a TMG mums' night out in Shibuya.
Jill had organised a booth at a theme bar called Lock Up. It took a while to find it, but when we did eventally locate it we had to enter down dimly-lit flights of stairs set in fake rock. Now and again we passed a monster. It all seemed fairly tame, but that was deceiving. The whole place was a maze of corridors with a jail cell booth for each group. We were shown into our cave-like chamber, where we had to sit Japanese-style on the floor round a low table. The drinks menu featured lots of horror concoctions served in test-tubes and the like. Jill and Halipa (a Kazakhstanian brought up in China who has excellent English and is married to a German!) had non-alcoholic cocktails in triangular lab beakers, and I took pot-luck and had a cocktail called Shock, which came in a very tall measuring tube and did indeed shock me by its strength.
We were warned that the lights would soon be going out and that there would be monsters on the loose, but we were still taken aback when it abruptly turned pitch black and there was a sound of chains jangling nearby. A small fluorescent strip made our eyes and teeth glow white amusingly and provided a little dim light: just enough to see the first ghoul who came lurching up the steps to our booth. I was surprised by how scared I felt, and screamed when he lunged at Halipa. Just when we'd dropped our guard a few minutes later a second visitor frightened all of us with its sudden appearance. Soon after, the lights came back on and we could relax again. I tried a second random cocktail but it was sickly sweet. The third came in a big plastic syringe which I had to squirt over crushed ice. We were subjected to a second bout of the monsters in the dark later, and I was petrified. I clambered over Cindy and clung onto her arm tightly, wondering what would come calling this time. Though it turned out to be a repeat of the first time we still all screamed.
Before we knew it, it was 11 o'clock. Jill was tired and Halipa had to go home, but Cindy and I weren't ready to call it a day just yet. While looking for Lock Up we had come across a British pub called The Aldgate. It really was a very authentic-feeling London pub. They had even adopted the no smoking rules from home, which made it even more appealing. Better still, they had a decent selection of ales on tap, and I had a pint of Abbot Ale while Cindy sportingly tried the Old Speckled Hen (she gamely drank half a pint but I could tell it wasn't quite to her liking). In the background they were showing live football, and I snuck the odd peek, though our conversation was far to absorbing for it to distract me overmuch. It is a terrible shame that Cindy is leaving Japan in a few weeks as I do like talking to her, and would gladly have stayed half the night chatting if it wasn't for knowing that Emily would not allow me a lie-in. We shared a cab home and I managed to get the driver to understand where to take me, even using some of what I'd learned in class. I was in by 1.30, glad that I was only tiddly and therefore unlikely to be hungover.
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