October 2014: New York City part one
In early October I was in New York, New York! There was a Morning Musume concert on October 5th, however that was just an excuse! Meeting up with some old friends that I've never ever met was the real reason :D!
Also I'm going to try and condense my entries a bit from now on so they're not so long, actually readable, but mostly so I can actually finish the damn things XDD
This was another JPH!P meetup basically, with a Morning Musume.'14 concert being the main attraction and drawing us all together. The previous big meetups have always been LEGENDARY and forever talked about, we really feel like a big family so this really was a reunion, even if I've never met any of these people before in real life :DD
Day 1: Traveling & Meeting up!
Friday was a lot of traveling, I woke up (well, stayed up all night nervous as usual) at 5am for my 8am flight, however as this was 5am, there wasn't any traffic, so I got there at 5:20am and I had forever to wait for this domestic flight to London, that... really sucked especially when I was too shy again and didn't go for any food or anything to pass the time, I tried but it took me forever to finally go in somewhere. Anyway, there was a delay in the terminal, then again taking off due to fog in London, which made me late arriving and I had to run through Heathrow to get to my gate. The plane was an ancient 747 and of cos my seat's tiny video screen didn't work properly XD great. I had a whole row of seats to myself which was awesome, later on a really nice Scottish lady came and sat next to me, which I totally didn't mind because we love our own kind, especially overseas, she even let me use her pen to filling out my landing card :D
I got about 2 hours of sleep on the plane, the immigration line in JFK was a total mess, and I was standing there not moving for close to an hour, eventually I was free! The immigration officer was actually really charming *___* she was really nice, there was some problem with my fingerprints not scanning (I am an android) but she was really sweet and made me feel welcome XDD. After I finally escaped I was finally free as I had no hold luggage (just a short trip!) so I and took the air train over to the 5th Terminal, where I was going to wait for my friends Boykun & Tenkei who were going to appear in a couple of hours from Los Angeles, but either from me being late or the time differences confusing me, they were actually still there, so I walked outside and met them, which you can see near the start of their video!
Spot me in this video a ton of times!
Then we took a crazy taxi ride to times square where the driver was pumping the gas so much he made Boykun feel sick and screamed FUCK 500 times and went in all these crazy directions when we actually got into New York, which I thought was excellent because we got the authentic shitty driver treatment, we even saw the globe/UFO thing from the end of Men In Black/Iron Man 2. I also seemed to find the only other Scottish person in the city who we drove past :D
Then we got back to their hotel for a while, I showed them my fancy UK money with all the weird people on them and we watched a little TV. I wasn't staying with them, I was staying with Daigong who is the webmaster of JPH!P but him and some others were up on the Empire State Building and his phone died so we just started wandering around for a while in Times Square (some guy liked my totoro shirt!) and taking some 2 shots, looking at jeans and going to several places like the Cake Boss Cafe (the whole place reeked of sugar) ~GOGO CURRY~ and Muji to go buy several tote bags and pink socks, then our friend Flyp was back at the hotel so we totes went to get him.
Katsu Curry at GOGO Curry
Boy & Ten swarmed Flyp with hugs and there wasn't really a place for me to go hug him too, so I just cupped his boobs and rested my head on his shoulder from behind and sighed, he seemed to enjoy it! We hung out in Boy & Ten's hotel room for a while, but I needed to meet up with Daigong at some point since we were staying together, also with JFC a bit later, so I left to go meet up with Dai and some others since he was now waiting at Toys R Us. I got a little lost, and wandered around times square for a while until I finally figured out what building was Toys R Us, there were roadworks everywhere so it was a bit awkward to get into. I saw my friend J-Triumph from outside and walked up kind of sideways so I seemed like a stranger, then snuck up to him and hug attacked him :D bwahaha he hated it so much, he was on the phone and started squirming so I let him go pretty fast. Then finally met DAIGONG, YEAH!!! he was happy to see me then chest bumped me into OUTER SPACE so hard that I almost fell over, hahaha it was great to finally meet the legend himself. Me and Dai went off to drop my stuff off at the hotel, get my keycard and such as people were still gathering there at TRU, so we went back after a bit then we met up with meeting with some familiar faces like Manamin, Chibs and some others along with some unfamiliar people like that dude and someguy we then walked down and crushed into John's Pizzzeria where the staff looked at the huge number of us like "oh shit" and we had a bit of a long wait to be crushed into 2 booths, I was with Dai, Chibs and some others I've never met before, I was MEGA jetlagged at this point and on the pictures that my friends took my face was incredibly red too, I looked like I was going to die, hahaha. Eventually Ping came a bit later! it was nice to finally meet him, he's one of the nicest people :D A little later I finally met YUUYAMI when she appeared, yeahhhh!! but I was trapped inside the booth and couldn't talk to her for ages after we were all done eating, but it was nice meeting her finally after playing 500 different games with her online over the years XD Dai and Ping would leave ever so often, leaving me with Chibs and 2 really, really quiet guys I've never met LOL I tried to talk to Chibs, but he was quiet too and hard to talk to, so I was a little frustrated that all my friends were elsewhere and I was stuck there a bit bored not talking, but I can totally understand why they were like that, I mean I'm a quiet person too and a lot of conversations with me are dead ends too, but also when I have to take the lead in conversations when no-one else will, I'm terrible at it, so it was bad news all round unfortunately \o/
Eventually our pizzas showed up! I forget what we had but both were really good.... I feel terrible for saying this (and some New Yorkers may kill me) but either New York Pizza is really over-hyped or other places in the world have just caught up to them, it seemed about the same to other pizzas I've had elsewhere, but I'm not knocking it all, it's really good! :D They only sell by the pie, and these are BIG thin crust pies, so big that the plates were stacked on top of each other on this metal stand that took up almost the entire table.
When we were all done we kind of split up to wander around Times Square some, a group went off to have fancy ice cream from this place up th street near the concert venue, but I was completely stuffed from the pizza and the GoGo Curry from earlier so I didn't go along.. but we passed by them eating and it looked really delicious so I regret that.. a bit!
We did some more wandering around, then later took our cameras out for some Times Square pics, including extremely jetlagged me who I can't show here because I am SO RED and look like total shit \o/ Also at the time Korean band B1A4 (biaf? lol) were performing at the concert venue, so many, many screaming fans were going crazy that they were leaving afterwards, so Dai took a video of them leaving the venue and pretended to be a screaming fan
I was pretty tired after all that travelling and no sleeping so I went to bed pretty early, even though that was still like 5am in the morning my time.
Times Square at night
Day 2: Exploring New York and Eating all the Things
Saturday I slept in, but since it was New York time, this was really 8am XDD the rain was crazy on this day and J-Tri eventually came over and we went to Kinokuniya, which had SO much stuff I wanted upstairs, eventually J disappeared and me and Dai spent a lot of time looking at magazines and pens in the basement \o/ I ended up buying 2 magazines and none of the stuff I wanted... haha.
It really was raining a lot!
We headed back to hotel for a bit since it was raining so much, then later we headed to Muji and Dai got a raincoat. Then we heard the others were in Nintendo World, so we headed up there and saw this awesome statue.
It's some copper statue wrapped up...xDDD
Nintendo World was so cool! I've never seen so many Mario plush toys, I was really close to getting a Cat Mario but they also had Tanooki Luigi and I couldn't decide, so I ended up buying neither... whoops, haha. But I did get 2 Tshirts, classic Zelda and SUPER NINTENDO. When I went up to pay for them, the clerk noticed my tshirt and called over his coworkers to look at it XD "woah! it's a Pokeball death star!" My T-shirts got noticed 2 out of 2 so far :D
This Zelda treasure chest opened with the Zelda music!! da da da daaa~~~
We headed to Lego world and looked at all the cool Lego sets, but by this point it was past lunchtime and Dai and I were starving because we hadn't eaten all day so we split up and headed to Grand Central for some food, there was so much to pick but dai got a croissant filled with tuna salad, and that looked good so I got the chicken version, and it was! Kimmu was in the city at this point and we were kinda struggling to meet up with her. I know now that her hotel literally is just around the corner from there but at the time we couldn't really find her and both of our phones stopped working so we just kind of wandered around and went to midtown comics which we bumped into.
Kind of warm today!
Then we wandered up 3rd avenue for a good while and I just took some random pics of stuff. Daigong had been looking for Subways all that day and yesterday to get his Taylor Swift cup (I have no idea why we only saw 2 the whole time we were there) so we go in and Dai buys it, pretends to pour ice and just walks out XDD eventually we got around to 34th/Park Ave and took some shots of the empire state, Daigong ate the building and I zoomed in to the top and swore some guy just waved at me (he didn't) then I used one of my ill advised mobile data checks and got a line message from Kimmu, then we got up to 35th, where Kimmu was!
Thx to Kimmu for letting me use this :D
After some waffle & ice cream eats and a root beer float explosion, our friend Hart found us too and it was time for karaoke at duet 35. We sung for an hour in English because there were no spare Japanese language machines so we had almost a 90's revival with Green Day, Wu Tang Clan, Snoop, Garbage and others, it was so much fun singing the Garbage songs with Kimmu <3 :DD I had a few ideas for Japanese songs to sing as a joke, but because we were stuck with English I sung Judas Priest's Painkiller.
Well.. more like screamed it :D
If you really wanna see me do it, there is a video, but don't say I didn't warn you XD
I broke my voice screaming the words! then we did Bohemian Rhapsody at full volume, then Hart rickrolled us perfectly at the end with Never Gonna Give You Up XDD We walked back to Times Square and on the way passed a Tim Hortons, then Kimmu spotted this place, which we had no idea what it was, but it had the Vivid logo and looked like a club, and it was next to a sex shop... what could it be!?
We were very confused!
Well I couldn't tell at the time on my camera screen, but looking at the pic it says "Vivid Cabaret" and it's actually this place, with a 25 foot stripper pole? haha wow, it was a strip club after all!
I'm kind of fuzzy about this part, I know we went back to the hotel first because my friend Andiie from Quebec had arrived and I was trying to meet with her (.... turns out she was at the karaoke place we went to...at the same time!) The Hello Party had started but it was pretty late before we even thought about going lolol. JFC came around this time too I'm sure, he's so nice!! Along with a bunch of others like Big Freaky \o/ Eventually we headed out to the Hello Party but I think someone said the magic words ~GOGO CURRY~ along the way and we just skipped the whole thing and ate there instead (totally worth it).
But in saying that it also turns out Andiie was there so ... whoops xD
yeahh!
We went around the back and waved to Johpan before security got mad and escorted us out of there, haha
We went back to the hotel to begin drinking the large amount of booze ping and tenkei brought with them, have 2 actual bartenders at a party really is the best thing ever, I think we sat and watched Django Unchained for most of it? or was that earlier? who cares I don't know xDD Daigong gave us an epic speech and we got our HEART SHAPED JPH!P WRISTBANDS 2K14!! YEAHH this was so great, even if there was a chance that we would get thrown out of our hotel, hahaha
JPHIIIIIIIIP
Behold, wall of drunk
"Everyone say hi to Almond!!"
"Handy Coasters!"
Eventually we headed out at 3am to go look at the people who were actually waiting outside for the concert in the morning, and again, I bumped into Afro Stud who I had met in Paris for Berryz/C-ute. He was apparently first in the line, and he was telling me about how the TSA pulled him aside and wrecked his phone... glad that didn't happen to me, lol. If you check out Kimmu's pics or Dai's video later you can see a bunch of the wotagei Flyp and some others did out in the street. Some guys walked past and shouted "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOIN!?" then later came back over, and one dude got really close up to someone, I thought there was going to be a fight, hahaha. Not sure what happened after that, but eventually we were back at the hotel and it was time for Kimmu to go back to her hotel so I walked her back then came home to mine, which was a bit scary by myself, especially with the old dude wandering around with his pants around his ankles and swearing at everyone XDDDDDDDDDD
"Bryant Park, where dudes don't wear pants"
Also I'm going to try and condense my entries a bit from now on so they're not so long, actually readable, but mostly so I can actually finish the damn things XDD
This was another JPH!P meetup basically, with a Morning Musume.'14 concert being the main attraction and drawing us all together. The previous big meetups have always been LEGENDARY and forever talked about, we really feel like a big family so this really was a reunion, even if I've never met any of these people before in real life :DD
Day 1: Traveling & Meeting up!
Friday was a lot of traveling, I woke up (well, stayed up all night nervous as usual) at 5am for my 8am flight, however as this was 5am, there wasn't any traffic, so I got there at 5:20am and I had forever to wait for this domestic flight to London, that... really sucked especially when I was too shy again and didn't go for any food or anything to pass the time, I tried but it took me forever to finally go in somewhere. Anyway, there was a delay in the terminal, then again taking off due to fog in London, which made me late arriving and I had to run through Heathrow to get to my gate. The plane was an ancient 747 and of cos my seat's tiny video screen didn't work properly XD great. I had a whole row of seats to myself which was awesome, later on a really nice Scottish lady came and sat next to me, which I totally didn't mind because we love our own kind, especially overseas, she even let me use her pen to filling out my landing card :D
I got about 2 hours of sleep on the plane, the immigration line in JFK was a total mess, and I was standing there not moving for close to an hour, eventually I was free! The immigration officer was actually really charming *___* she was really nice, there was some problem with my fingerprints not scanning (I am an android) but she was really sweet and made me feel welcome XDD. After I finally escaped I was finally free as I had no hold luggage (just a short trip!) so I and took the air train over to the 5th Terminal, where I was going to wait for my friends Boykun & Tenkei who were going to appear in a couple of hours from Los Angeles, but either from me being late or the time differences confusing me, they were actually still there, so I walked outside and met them, which you can see near the start of their video!
Click to viewSpot me in this video a ton of times!
Then we took a crazy taxi ride to times square where the driver was pumping the gas so much he made Boykun feel sick and screamed FUCK 500 times and went in all these crazy directions when we actually got into New York, which I thought was excellent because we got the authentic shitty driver treatment, we even saw the globe/UFO thing from the end of Men In Black/Iron Man 2. I also seemed to find the only other Scottish person in the city who we drove past :D
Then we got back to their hotel for a while, I showed them my fancy UK money with all the weird people on them and we watched a little TV. I wasn't staying with them, I was staying with Daigong who is the webmaster of JPH!P but him and some others were up on the Empire State Building and his phone died so we just started wandering around for a while in Times Square (some guy liked my totoro shirt!) and taking some 2 shots, looking at jeans and going to several places like the Cake Boss Cafe (the whole place reeked of sugar) ~GOGO CURRY~ and Muji to go buy several tote bags and pink socks, then our friend Flyp was back at the hotel so we totes went to get him.
Katsu Curry at GOGO Curry
Boy & Ten swarmed Flyp with hugs and there wasn't really a place for me to go hug him too, so I just cupped his boobs and rested my head on his shoulder from behind and sighed, he seemed to enjoy it! We hung out in Boy & Ten's hotel room for a while, but I needed to meet up with Daigong at some point since we were staying together, also with JFC a bit later, so I left to go meet up with Dai and some others since he was now waiting at Toys R Us. I got a little lost, and wandered around times square for a while until I finally figured out what building was Toys R Us, there were roadworks everywhere so it was a bit awkward to get into. I saw my friend J-Triumph from outside and walked up kind of sideways so I seemed like a stranger, then snuck up to him and hug attacked him :D bwahaha he hated it so much, he was on the phone and started squirming so I let him go pretty fast. Then finally met DAIGONG, YEAH!!! he was happy to see me then chest bumped me into OUTER SPACE so hard that I almost fell over, hahaha it was great to finally meet the legend himself. Me and Dai went off to drop my stuff off at the hotel, get my keycard and such as people were still gathering there at TRU, so we went back after a bit then we met up with meeting with some familiar faces like Manamin, Chibs and some others along with some unfamiliar people like that dude and someguy we then walked down and crushed into John's Pizzzeria where the staff looked at the huge number of us like "oh shit" and we had a bit of a long wait to be crushed into 2 booths, I was with Dai, Chibs and some others I've never met before, I was MEGA jetlagged at this point and on the pictures that my friends took my face was incredibly red too, I looked like I was going to die, hahaha. Eventually Ping came a bit later! it was nice to finally meet him, he's one of the nicest people :D A little later I finally met YUUYAMI when she appeared, yeahhhh!! but I was trapped inside the booth and couldn't talk to her for ages after we were all done eating, but it was nice meeting her finally after playing 500 different games with her online over the years XD Dai and Ping would leave ever so often, leaving me with Chibs and 2 really, really quiet guys I've never met LOL I tried to talk to Chibs, but he was quiet too and hard to talk to, so I was a little frustrated that all my friends were elsewhere and I was stuck there a bit bored not talking, but I can totally understand why they were like that, I mean I'm a quiet person too and a lot of conversations with me are dead ends too, but also when I have to take the lead in conversations when no-one else will, I'm terrible at it, so it was bad news all round unfortunately \o/
Eventually our pizzas showed up! I forget what we had but both were really good.... I feel terrible for saying this (and some New Yorkers may kill me) but either New York Pizza is really over-hyped or other places in the world have just caught up to them, it seemed about the same to other pizzas I've had elsewhere, but I'm not knocking it all, it's really good! :D They only sell by the pie, and these are BIG thin crust pies, so big that the plates were stacked on top of each other on this metal stand that took up almost the entire table.
When we were all done we kind of split up to wander around Times Square some, a group went off to have fancy ice cream from this place up th street near the concert venue, but I was completely stuffed from the pizza and the GoGo Curry from earlier so I didn't go along.. but we passed by them eating and it looked really delicious so I regret that.. a bit!
We did some more wandering around, then later took our cameras out for some Times Square pics, including extremely jetlagged me who I can't show here because I am SO RED and look like total shit \o/ Also at the time Korean band B1A4 (biaf? lol) were performing at the concert venue, so many, many screaming fans were going crazy that they were leaving afterwards, so Dai took a video of them leaving the venue and pretended to be a screaming fan
I was pretty tired after all that travelling and no sleeping so I went to bed pretty early, even though that was still like 5am in the morning my time.
Times Square at night
Day 2: Exploring New York and Eating all the Things
Saturday I slept in, but since it was New York time, this was really 8am XDD the rain was crazy on this day and J-Tri eventually came over and we went to Kinokuniya, which had SO much stuff I wanted upstairs, eventually J disappeared and me and Dai spent a lot of time looking at magazines and pens in the basement \o/ I ended up buying 2 magazines and none of the stuff I wanted... haha.
It really was raining a lot!
We headed back to hotel for a bit since it was raining so much, then later we headed to Muji and Dai got a raincoat. Then we heard the others were in Nintendo World, so we headed up there and saw this awesome statue.
It's some copper statue wrapped up...xDDD
Nintendo World was so cool! I've never seen so many Mario plush toys, I was really close to getting a Cat Mario but they also had Tanooki Luigi and I couldn't decide, so I ended up buying neither... whoops, haha. But I did get 2 Tshirts, classic Zelda and SUPER NINTENDO. When I went up to pay for them, the clerk noticed my tshirt and called over his coworkers to look at it XD "woah! it's a Pokeball death star!" My T-shirts got noticed 2 out of 2 so far :D
This Zelda treasure chest opened with the Zelda music!! da da da daaa~~~
We headed to Lego world and looked at all the cool Lego sets, but by this point it was past lunchtime and Dai and I were starving because we hadn't eaten all day so we split up and headed to Grand Central for some food, there was so much to pick but dai got a croissant filled with tuna salad, and that looked good so I got the chicken version, and it was! Kimmu was in the city at this point and we were kinda struggling to meet up with her. I know now that her hotel literally is just around the corner from there but at the time we couldn't really find her and both of our phones stopped working so we just kind of wandered around and went to midtown comics which we bumped into.
Kind of warm today!
Then we wandered up 3rd avenue for a good while and I just took some random pics of stuff. Daigong had been looking for Subways all that day and yesterday to get his Taylor Swift cup (I have no idea why we only saw 2 the whole time we were there) so we go in and Dai buys it, pretends to pour ice and just walks out XDD eventually we got around to 34th/Park Ave and took some shots of the empire state, Daigong ate the building and I zoomed in to the top and swore some guy just waved at me (he didn't) then I used one of my ill advised mobile data checks and got a line message from Kimmu, then we got up to 35th, where Kimmu was!
Thx to Kimmu for letting me use this :D
After some waffle & ice cream eats and a root beer float explosion, our friend Hart found us too and it was time for karaoke at duet 35. We sung for an hour in English because there were no spare Japanese language machines so we had almost a 90's revival with Green Day, Wu Tang Clan, Snoop, Garbage and others, it was so much fun singing the Garbage songs with Kimmu <3 :DD I had a few ideas for Japanese songs to sing as a joke, but because we were stuck with English I sung Judas Priest's Painkiller.
Well.. more like screamed it :D
If you really wanna see me do it, there is a video, but don't say I didn't warn you XD
I broke my voice screaming the words! then we did Bohemian Rhapsody at full volume, then Hart rickrolled us perfectly at the end with Never Gonna Give You Up XDD We walked back to Times Square and on the way passed a Tim Hortons, then Kimmu spotted this place, which we had no idea what it was, but it had the Vivid logo and looked like a club, and it was next to a sex shop... what could it be!?
We were very confused!
Well I couldn't tell at the time on my camera screen, but looking at the pic it says "Vivid Cabaret" and it's actually this place, with a 25 foot stripper pole? haha wow, it was a strip club after all!
I'm kind of fuzzy about this part, I know we went back to the hotel first because my friend Andiie from Quebec had arrived and I was trying to meet with her (.... turns out she was at the karaoke place we went to...at the same time!) The Hello Party had started but it was pretty late before we even thought about going lolol. JFC came around this time too I'm sure, he's so nice!! Along with a bunch of others like Big Freaky \o/ Eventually we headed out to the Hello Party but I think someone said the magic words ~GOGO CURRY~ along the way and we just skipped the whole thing and ate there instead (totally worth it).
But in saying that it also turns out Andiie was there so ... whoops xD
yeahh!
We went around the back and waved to Johpan before security got mad and escorted us out of there, haha
We went back to the hotel to begin drinking the large amount of booze ping and tenkei brought with them, have 2 actual bartenders at a party really is the best thing ever, I think we sat and watched Django Unchained for most of it? or was that earlier? who cares I don't know xDD Daigong gave us an epic speech and we got our HEART SHAPED JPH!P WRISTBANDS 2K14!! YEAHH this was so great, even if there was a chance that we would get thrown out of our hotel, hahaha
JPHIIIIIIIIP
Behold, wall of drunk
"Everyone say hi to Almond!!"
"Handy Coasters!"
Eventually we headed out at 3am to go look at the people who were actually waiting outside for the concert in the morning, and again, I bumped into Afro Stud who I had met in Paris for Berryz/C-ute. He was apparently first in the line, and he was telling me about how the TSA pulled him aside and wrecked his phone... glad that didn't happen to me, lol. If you check out Kimmu's pics or Dai's video later you can see a bunch of the wotagei Flyp and some others did out in the street. Some guys walked past and shouted "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOIN!?" then later came back over, and one dude got really close up to someone, I thought there was going to be a fight, hahaha. Not sure what happened after that, but eventually we were back at the hotel and it was time for Kimmu to go back to her hotel so I walked her back then came home to mine, which was a bit scary by myself, especially with the old dude wandering around with his pants around his ankles and swearing at everyone XDDDDDDDDDD
"Bryant Park, where dudes don't wear pants"