So it seems that blogs are getting me in trouble a lot more nowadays than they ever have in the past. It looks like certain people are getting a bit cocky when reporting to mummy and daddy about what their sister is getting up to away. I would hate for mummy and daddy to be disappointed when they hear about what their little informer has been getting up to under their own roof.

I have been job searching for the past couple days, which I find super stressful, but worth it for whats gonna happen. I need money to manage to eat out every night because cooking is lame. We're about to be kicked out of the internet cafe because it closes at midnight. I'm listening to Patrick Wolf and I think I really should have bought an ipod. I'm going back out tomorrow morning to give out more CV's. I have a trial with a door to door sales company at 1pm tomorrow. I haven't decided if i'm going to do it or not because it's purely commission based, and while I'm traipsing around I could be earning a wage, but if I don't find anything else, I may as well.

it's been a shitload of time but i spoke to my brother this morning who told me that i hadnt updated my blog, so i figure at least one person is actually reading this. i am now in australia, land of the brave, and trying to figure out what the hell im going to do with my life. i need a job. this is a sad truth. this morning we went to the supermarket and bought the cheapest spaghetti amd spaghetti sauce that they had, but also managed to drop $30 each on a bottle of soco. prioritues people. actually, it will work out to save us money because going out to drink is astonishingly expensive. turns out while everyone was warning us about tokyo, sydney is like, twice or more the price for a bottle. so plans for tonight include our first outing to kings cross, the big club area of the city. first time we went out here we went to a shitty pretentious bar full of assholes with money, or who wanted you to think they had money. after that, we went to a trashy meat market club where the bartender at least gave us cheap vodka cranberries because we had been there the day before at he remembered us. so cross your fingers for third time lucky.

the beaches here are pretty awesome and the real selling point of the city, otherwise you are anywhere, the world. the vast majority of accents on the street are english. most people in the hostel are english too, with some canadians, french and germans. the real australians prove elusive. for a while after i got here i was disappointed slightly by how similar it was to home. because i had left home and wanted a bit of excitement, frisson and danger, not somewhere thats approximately the safest place in the world, where everyone speaks english. but sydney is a charming city and very pleasant to walk round and the beaches really are amazing. next week we are going on 'holiday' to bondi and staying in a hostel there while we hand out cv's and try to get a bar/restaurant job on the seafront, the holy grail of jobs out here: well paid and near the beach. whatever, don't hold your breath.

susie just found an advert on gumtree which said bar job available so we both rang, and the guy was like, its a lingerie waitress.. yeh it is what you think it is. lots of sketchy shit out there.

after america i really want to go to argentina, and the rest of south america, but argentina especially. to be honest the only thing i know about it is tango and beef, but i figure i can manage on those two things alone. my wanderlust is not satisfied yet

I never wrote about mt. fuji. it was pretty awesome.

I am actually going to miss Japan like crazy, it's like no other place on Earth that I've ever seen and as a culture is absolutely fascinating. The places are clean and well signposted, my friend the subway is a pleasant experience and the people are charming and well dressed. The food is pretty good and there are loads of different types of stuff. The men are hot. The clubs are good. No reason not to come here.

We're just hanging out in the hostel wasting time online for a couple hours before we have to leave. We are gonna meet up with Marc in the hostel once we get to Oz so soon there will be three. Can't wait to see him and catch up. Wish us luck for the flight!

A funny thing just happened. Greg walked by and said what time is your flight, and we were like 8. And then I just said, yeh it really sucks that we missed it. And he was like AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW dudes! (Greg is Canadian) That sucks so hard, what are you gonna do, what are you doing now. I'm killing myself laughing and then suddenly shit myself up, like what if it really was at 8am. So I look on my gmail account and everything is ok, I didn't fuck up, like the time we were flying to Tokyo through terminal 5 and I told Susie it was terminal 2 after walking from Terminal 5 to Terminal 2. Yeh

Remember that time in Ebisu when we saw those Japanese girls doing synchronised dancing for no reason.

We spent the whole day in bed today. Kind of a waste of a day, but we need our strength for climbing Mt. Fuji tomorrow. It is kind of exciting, except I am kind of unfit and unused to strenous exercise so we'll see how it goes.

I'm off for a curry later hopefully which I am very excited for.

It was a bit sad in the morning when the Irish girls and Toko left, because it seems like you're only just getting to know someone and they leave. Toko put us in contact with one of her friends who lives in Sydney so we can maybe hang out or something which is cool.

We decided to go back to the Tokyo Met Museum of Photography in Ebisu, which was completely worth it. The exhibition was Japanese photographers abroad, covering a from about 1920 up to now. Amazing pictures.

Afterwards we decided to take a stroll around Shinjuku which is really near to where we're staying. I had gone the day before for a walk but Susie was busy on her date so she wanted to see it. We ended up in a nice restaurant, where we ordered tofu salad. Mistake! The tofu looked like a giant babybel sat in the middle of the veggies. It had a really slimy yet cottage cheesy texture and was totally bland. We also ordered some endemame beans and amaaaaaazing cucumbers with some sort of sesame dressing on it, so it wasn't too bad. After we both decided to brave the dessert menu, and got trad Japanese desserts. Susie got a pancake with miso something that was like a vanilla ball, and i got a scoop of icecream and cheese mousse. Neither of us particularly enjoyed them. I also got a ginger ale kitkat which is completely amazing to me. Lemony and really good. And the packaging is totally different to at home.

We were both a bit knackered so we spent some time down by the communal computers when we got in, zoning out and chatting to people at home, and were soon joined by a French guy who's travelling all around the world alone. We invited him upstairs for a drink and then met an Oz travelling here who we also invited in. Then another dude, from China/USA came in so we invited him in too. Kind of a messy night...

Today we got up at 5 motherfucking AM to go the the fish market. We all managed to leave on time at a very respectable 5.30, some of us with a full face of make up (Susie) or rolled out of bed at the last second with witches hair (Zoe). Either way, we managed to see some really awesome stuff including beheaded tuna, eels in piles of blood and other gross/awesome stuff. After some of the more adventurous of the group ate sashimi for breakfast, the sane ones of us waited for a while for pizza in the zoo. The zoo in Ueno park deserves its own paragraph so ...

The park is the largest one in central Tokyo with a large population of homeless people, mainly men who lost jobs during the recession in the 90's, who mostly hide themselves away during the day. There are a few shrines in the grounds, where we went and cleansed ourselves and wrote a prayer on a block of wood, where loads of other people in all different languages had written their own. There were some beautiful prayers and some really funny cute ones, such as the one who wished for her young son to pass his third grade reading. I wished for peace, courage and happiness, but it was a cheesy effort and I wished I had more time to think of awesome stuff, alas mine is not a genius that manifests spontaneously.

The zoo was awesome. There was some sort of Japanese school children trip which was every level of adorable. They were about 4 and 5, mostly with swine flu masks, with their amazing sailor outfit and colour coordinated hats. I kept wanting to reach out and pinch their cheeks. Honestly, they were almost the highlight of the whole zoo.

After that, I came home and slept for maybe like, 4 hours and then Susie had to go out and get ready for her date and I decided to go to Shinjuku, because I hadn't been out there yet. I went and had dinner which was sushi with raw salmon, which was the first sushi I'd had in Tokyo but hopefully not the last. It was incredibly delicous, melt in the mouth, and not a huge mouthful of flesh which was my experience in England. After I went shopping and stumbled across Piss Alley which was completely charming and smelt completely delicous. I also found a second hand Gothic Lolita store, which advertised vintage Vivienne Westwood. Intrigued, I went in and found a vintage scarf for approx £20 which is what I would pay for a new, non designer in England. It's the first proper designer I've ever bought and I couldn't be more excited to have it in my possesion. I figure I can sell it for way more in Sydney if necessary but I would love to keep it. I think it's completely beautiful and am so happy to have found an amazing bargain which I will remember forever.

And Shinjuku is cool too I guess. Lots of good sights and signs. and stuff, i dunno, see it yourself, or google image it, i cba

Today we got up fairly early and decided as a special treat to go to McDonalds for breakfast, sick of bloody rice for every meal. After that we decided to go to the Ebisu Gardens and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography but forgot to check whether it was open or not. Being a Monday, of course, it was not. Obviously we are amazing at planning our lives. Still, we saw the Rodin in the gardens, which was worth the trip for me.

After that, armed with an all day economy ticket, we headed to Shibuya which was every cliche about Tokyo come to life. At the big crossroads, it is completely insane every time the lights change, a fucking sea of humanity descends on the shops and buildings. We were intensely set on seeing some art by this point so we walked around intensely looking for a shopping centre with a gallery that we had read about in our little bible. We eventually found it along with such shops as opening ceremony, miu miu and other depressing yet awesome shops. I enquired about the price of some of the smaller pieces because they were fucking awesome, but they weren't for sale, which was for the best. The pieces were incredibly Japanese, sad and beautiful. We are definitely planning to go to Ginza which is where there is a high concentration of galleries, or so we have read. Mostly contemporary and tiny which is a high plus in my opinion, even if that makes me sound me like a pretentious douchebag.

We accidentally stumbled across the highest concentration of love hotels in Shibuya as well. They are completely ridiculous and look like crazy castles and stuff, and are kind of ridiculously cute underneath the seedy underbelly of sex by the hour.

After Shibuya, we saw that electric city was only a few Subway stops from where we were, so we decided to detour to Akihabara and look at random stuff for a while. We saw the lights, the random electrics, some manga and ended up in a massive store, while Susie searched desperately in vain for a converter from UK to Japan. After this I was knackered and flagging badly because of the stifling heat, and shouting of sales assistants in their shrill voices, shouting in to the ether, through megaphones and something to the tune of "I'm getting married in the morning", or alternatively "glory glory man utd" being piped through the speakers. Afterwards though, I fortified myself with icecream and randomly got a sugar rush at like midnight. Which was awesome for the insomnia I seem to have picked up too.

We had heard that Sunday is the best day to see the Harajuku girls so off we went after sleeping off the after effects of an awesome Saturday night. I have to say that I fell totally and completely in love with Harajuku at first sight. The Disney store is completely ridiculous and we found a little toy shop with some amazing things, like Pokemon, a working Thomas the Tank mini train set, and lots of electronic stuff. Then we walked down the main road with all the designers and funky Japanese clothes shops that were crazy expensive but totally beautiful and ended up going for lunch in a tiny cafe that only made dishes based around avocado. It was completely charming and completely delicous. I had a coconut avocado curry, which was half an avocado perfectly scooped out with rice and an amazing thai curry sauce. Susie had smoked salmon with avocado balls, which had the most amazing smoked salmon I have ever tasted. Strengthened by our food, we braved the smaller streets off Harajuku which resemble a better, cooler, Camdem market, with lots of cool Japanese brands that I haven't seen anywhere else. We only saw 3 girls actually dressed up but when Susie asked to take their pictures, they refused. There is a big Topshop, H&M and Forever 21 also in Harajuku that we couldnt resist looking in.

Second day we basically slept nearly all day. After staying out till about half 1 the night before, there was no way we were doing anything but.
However, this being a Saturday night, meant that we were required by law to start drinking pretty early in the evening. We showered, got dressed up and went out to Roppongi for some kareoke, and a club.

The kareoke was pretty amazing. I had been expecting something out of Lost in Translation, but we got a private booth. Drinking on the street is allowed so we went to a convenience shop and bought vodka lemondade in a can. Before I went in to kareoke, I hid it behind a piece of wood and after we left, I picked it back up again. This seemed to make perfect sense to me at the time, and I gotta say, it still does. It was me and Susie, Toko, and two Irish girls -Clare and Julie, who were also staying on our floor. Being pretty wasted, I sang and danced around like a lunatic shaking a tambourine. I had some melon saki while in there which was delicous as well.

After kareoke finished, everyone went to a club called gaspanic. Soon after we got there, Susie and Toko had been pulled up on the bar by the bartender. I remember refusing but somehow I ended up getting on there too with the other girls. After a night of dancing, we ended up in the cheapest restaurant in Roppongi, sharing gyoza and miso ramen with Toko. After the meal, we were sitting around chatting, discussing whether or not we had ever done a runner from a restaurant. I'm sure you can guess ... yup, we ended up walking out casually, seeing the subway which was directly outside the restaurant, and sprinting towards it. In the subway we wasted precious moments discussing where to go, and turn around to see the waitress from the restaurant shouting at us in shrill Japanese, while Toko tried to explain that we'd left money on the table. After running in to two other guys from the hostel and sticking with our story, we finally escaped after paying "twice" and came home at about 7.30am, after a wonderful detour to a subway stop with almost but not quite the same name as the one we needed.

I am travelling around the world with my friend Susie. At the moment I'm in Tokyo for 8 more days and have been here for 6. These past few days have been so incredible, I'm so glad I took the plunge and just decided to fuck everyone off and do my own thing. Before I left, I was working in a well known English supermarket for shit pay but I managed to save up some money, worked some more hours, buy a ticket, work some more, panic some more and finally got here.

After a long and boring flight, we queued for a while in customs etc. Got a super expensive train from the airport in to Shinjuku which is the largest train station in Tokyo; kind of intimidating in the first few minutes of being here, sleep deprived and lugging a huge suitcase up flights of stairs. We managed to find our hostel which is only 2 stops from there and two seconds walk from the subway which is amazin and very nice when you're tired and want to sleep NOW!

To our amazement, when we checked in, they told us that we had the tatami style bedroom on the 10th floor. This is a traditional style Japanese bedroom with paper walls and a woven floor with mattresses on it. This means we have more privacy and more space to spread our stuff round. In the past week this means that the floor is full of assorted cosmetics, dirty laundry and shoes.

Soon after, we met a lovely girl called Toko who is half-Japanese from Australia. She speaks fluent Japanese and very kindly offered to take us out somewhere local and ordered our food for us. It was a life saver when we were too tired and overwhelmed to figure anything out for ourselves.