Japan: the Lockup.

After the beer garden, we went to Shibuya to meet up with Kaori and Shihomi. I wasn't any help making a decision about what to do, partly because I'm not exactly a Shibuya expert and partly because I'm never any help making decisions. Eventually someone in the group got a mischievous glimmer in their eyes and said, "Ooh, let's take her to the Lockup!"

They wouldn't tell me what it was, and after going through the door, it mostly seemed like a cheesy haunted house, with a dummy being "electrocuted" and so on. But there was just a little bit of that, and when we walked through another door, it became a jail-themed restaurant/bar, still decorated in a pretty cheesy way. A woman in a naughty cop outfit came up to us and apparently asked who should be handcuffed - everyone else in the group nominated me. So she handcuffed me and led us all to our "cell" - each group gets their own cell with a table [like any good Japanese restaurant, you take your shoes off and sit on the floor].

My drink - you use the turkey baster thing to put the alcohol into the other test tubes and then mix all of the colors however you want. A lot of the drinks had a "mad scientist" theme - I think this was one was called the human experiment.
Note also the pill on the plate - bad-tasting liquor in an edible plastic-y cover that you really take like a pill.

Occasionally the music would go crazy and the lights would start flashing, and monsters would come into cells. Sarah and Erin chose to dance with ours - and/or stab and be choked by ours.

My senior year of high school, I went to Tokyo for a week and a half on a school trip. My classmates and I all stayed with host families whose daughters were going to the same college. My host sister [Kaori] and I stayed in touch for a little bit at first but then kind of lost contact, and when I tried to e-mail her and the other host sisters that I was coming, most of the addresses bounced back and I didn't hear back from anyone. I tried one more last-ditch effort a few days before I left Japan, and finally Shihomi, one of the other host sisters, wrote me back and got back in touch with Kaori [they had lost contact with each other, too], and we all planned to meet up. So seven years after I had been to Japan and six after they had come to visit in Wisconsin, we finally saw each other again! I was so happy and glad it worked out.

Shihomi starred in a great photo series:

"Oh hey, what's this?"

"OH GOD what is this?!?"

"Well...guess I'll eat it."