Muse at 5am

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A number of kids from SAS went out to Tokyo the first night and went to a club called Muse, which was pretty packed with our crew.  The trains stopped running at 12am and stay closed until 5am.  I don’t know if everyone knew that, or if people who have a good amount of alcohol in their system have the judgment to care properly about how much sleep they should get and what kind of plans they have in place for lodging, but somehow a pretty good number of people did not make it back to the ship.

 

One of them was my friend Noor, the second Palestinian I’ve ever met.  (HEY TARIK, PAY ATTENTION).  Her friends Angie and someone else who I’m forgetting (Yensi?) got stuck along with her.  They took a train back at 5:00am and showed up in Yokohama sometime around 6:00am, and decided to walk to the ship instead of take a cab.  They didn’t make it back to the ship until about 7:40, which was right when they sat down at the table where I was eating breakfast.  It sounded seriously like a nightmare.  Furthermore, Noor had a fairly long trip with SAS that day – the same one I was going on, actually, called Cultural Tokyo.

 

She was pretty wiped for most of the trip.  I sat at the window seat at first but asked her if she wanted to switch, and she said no, she was fine.  I asked her again a tiny bit later if she wanted to switch and she said, “Actually… yeah.”  So we did, and she fell asleep leaning against the window.  I had only gotten like five hours of sleep myself and was a little bit exhausted and knew that a long night was coming up as well, so I told her, “I’m sleeping on your shoulder,” and she said okay and I just leaned there.  I think I may have fallen asleep for just a few seconds, but not nearly as long as her.

 

It was cold that day.  We were in a park near an emperor’s palace, I believe, and we wanted something to eat.  I kept an eye on the group, and Noor waited in line and got some vanilla ice cream.  I would have liked some as well, but I was sick, so I didn’t want to go back and forth sharing the cone with her.  She did ask me if I wanted some though, so I explained, and told her maybe when she was done she could just give me the rest, and that I really liked the cone part and she didn’t, so that would be fine.  When we caught back up to the group, everyone looked at her like she was crazy.  And by everyone, I mean everyone, including strangers and Japanese people.  She enjoyed it though.  And when she was done with it, I enjoyed it as well.  It was good ice cream.

 

The cone did not have a matrix.  I was sad about that.  But it was still good.