Second Birthday Party with CFri
I stayed up late for some reason that I can't remember at the moment. So I woke up a little late again. But I didn't need to get up and ready till 11:30am because TTki was going to take me out for my birthday and treat me to lunch. We went to this Chinese buffet place. It costed $10 a person, and there were 5 of us, but none of us really liked the food. Kind of a shame I think. I appreciated it, but TTki didn't like the food. Which is weird because he was the one who took us there. Anyways it was a nice gesture.
The next stop was to Citibank at Yokohama station. We both were curious about opening an account there and possibly some investments as well. When we got there, it seemed promising, but as we looked through some literature and talked to the teller, we both decided that it costs too much still comparatively and the margin of returns aren't that great. For investments and such, it wouldn't be worth the trouble.
We finished early, so we went shopping for some Christmas gifts, yes we both waited till the last minute. We went to Tokyu Hands, which is kind of a novelty store. They have some interesting stuff there, and we both bought some bath things. I bought some stuff for a gift exchange for tomorrow and a nice looking calendar for AHda because he will go to China soon. It was a really nice Chinese calendar.
After that, I walked TTki back to the station and told him that I still had some more shopping to do, actually it was shopping for his gift. I went to Yodabashi camera. I had talked to YYto on the phone earlier about the gift I was planning to get TTki. It was actually more expensive that I could have imagined. But I bought it anyways since he will be leaving for Australia soon. I bought him a new MP3 Player so he can take his tunes with him around. He just bought a brand new laptop and digital camera. He's got tons of points left on his Yamada Denki card, but he didn't have this one yet. So I was pretty happy about it. It took a little while to decide which one to get, but I think I made a pretty good choice.
After that I headed off to go to Shinjuku to meet CFri. It took a short time to get there, but a long time to find her. Shinjuku was packed, and I mean packed with tons of people. Last minute shoppers and many couples. Kinda annoying since they wouldn't get out of my way. But I was looking for El Torito, but didn't know it. I haven't been to Shinjuku that often and I couldn't find out where CFri was. She could have just told me that she was at the El Torito, it would have been more helpful, but she was at a location where there were more than one store, so I kept going back and forth to the wrong ones. But one of the service people pointed me to the right direction.
Once I finally arrived about 50 minutes later, I was freezing my ass off. But I was greeted by her and her friend. We went to El Torito and we didn't have to wait long to get in. We just beat the rush of people, which was incredibly fortunate for us. I've heard bad stories about the experiences from other people here. But to be honest, I didn't have a such a bad time. They were crappy in some areas, like no Birthday song and the food took a little while to get to us. But since we beat the rush to get into the joint, it wasn't that bad at the end. We still got our pictures taken and the food was good. All good things that I liked. AH, and Ikuko, and me and CFri were at dinner, but MTka came and joined us for Karaoke. It wasn't that much fun. Since most of them had to leave early and a few songs were sang. I did get a chance to talk to AHda more, but it was very short before we too had to leave.
When we went to pay, it ended up being $43 for me and AHda to pay because they charged such a high price for having each person in the room. Room charge will kill you, but it was ok, I didn't care. But on the way home, I found the perfect gift for MTki, I walked into the Liquor section of a store and they had all types of whiskey. It was hard to choose, but I just grabbed one and was off to the train station and back home.
