Weekend in Tokyo, Daft Punk baby!

OK I am back after a stupid CRAZY fun weekend in Tokyo (that city is insane...)!

The weekend was super eventful even though some bad things happened.

I was planning to go alone, since my gf had work, and doesn't like Daft Punk, but at a welcome party I met a guy who said he would go, and he invited a friend of his, who has never heard of Daft Punk, but she wanted to come with.

We met up like 3 hours before the show, and I took em on a quick Harajuku tour and had to go find my hotel and check in. The map on their website was FUBARed so I got lost and spent almost 45 mins looking for the damn place, but eventually found it and met up with them at Tokyo station. At this time it was like 20 mins after the show started and we were 35 mins away by train.

We eventually get there and find out just some small time DJs were on (but still good! Ryukyudisco is a Japanese house group who combine traditional Japanese taiko drums and house. ALL Amazing! Also Boom Boom Satellites is a Jpop/Jrock band who went all house for the show! Live drums, guitars, all played to some house music to back it up.) and Daft Punk was going on at 7:10.

We all drank too much and just kept buying more and more drinks (each drink was 600 yen). We met a girl who thought we needed help, but I speak enough Japanese to get by, so we told her we were OK and she was off. 10 minutes later we meet her again, and find out she was there alone, so she rocked with us the rest of the night. When it was 10 minutes to DP, we did the last restroom break, got one more drink, and "gaijin"ed (Japanese people are too polite to stop people who move their ways forward through a crowd, and foreigners, gaijin, can take advantage of this. Hey, for DP what are you gonna do) our ways to the front.

The other girl's ears started ringing and my friend took her to the very back, while I stayed near the front with our new friend (her first DP show, and first house concert ever. Her first time gaijining to the front even though she was Japanese) and we listened to the last minutes of the small DJ. Unlike my first DP show last year, that had a good 20 minute delay between the last act and them, the small time DJ finished his last song, and before people could start clapping, the "First Encounter of the Third Kind" music started playing, and the DP pyramid was unveiled! People went crazy! This venue is a huge floor, surrounded on the sides by raised seating, like a concert hall. There were old people, kids as young as 4 or 5 years old, but the WHOLE place went NUTS!

If you don't know their current live set, go get Alive 2007 and you will know exactly what I hear, in the order I heard it. Even though it was my second time hearing them, it was better than the first time for a few reasons. I was with people who love Daft Punk, minus the girl who didn't know them, they did an encore after 5 minutes of people clapping and chanting, and the energy from the other people was way more hectic than last year's.

But 1 bad thing did happen during the show. When One More Time came on, EVERY PERSON IN THE PLACE, went crazy as hell! People started jumping AND pushing, and I wanted to take more video with my camera, and I reached for it, but it was GONE! Yes, 4 people from the front gate now, and the last time I used my camera, was about 40 feet behind me, and I have hundreds of people bouncing and jumping to One More Time, I will never see my camera again... After the show, the girl we met, Yuko, helped me ask some security (which I don't have enough Japanese to do) where I could find my camera, and they led us to the right place but my camera hadn't turned up, so we got a number to call and the next day my camera turned up as I was shopping to replace it with a newer smaller camera (hey it is Japan! Newer and smaller is a weekly thing!).

The next plan is to go to Tokyo and see Digitalism in February. I love this country!