Nightlife in Tokyo

(Check out my first post on arriving in Tokyo!)
What can really be said about nightlife in Toyko? It’s absolutely ridiculous and like nothing you’ve ever experienced before!
First of all, it’s huge. In Roppongi (the nightlife area frequented by foreigners…to mixed reviews) there are bars packed in every space possible. Tokyo builds out vertically, so plenty of bars and clubs are on the 7th, 8th, 9th floors of the buildings. It’s a little unnerving when you don’t speak much of the language, but great fun.
We went out in Roppongi our second night in Tokyo. Our first stop was a gem of a place that I *loved* – the Jazz Cafe London. It’s right at the main intersection of the club district, which is an odd place because it’s this 20-seat basement jazz bar. It’s fantastic. Nice selection of scotch and great jazz – what more could a guy ask for?

From there the night descended into madness. We stopped at Paddy Foley’s – also the scene of the crime about 3 weeks later. Nice enough bar, but some tough-guy rugby players wanted to beat us up at some point. And Adam insulted the bartender – both times we were there.

We made our way from Paddy’s to some western-themed bar. Not sure why we went in there; it was 2:30am and I think we were comforted by the cowboy hats. Huh? Anyway, we were only half-welcome there, so the bartender just decided to start playing darts. Eventually we got the hint.

So we decided to go back to the hotel, but not before Adam met a new friend:

Well, she wasn’t so much a friend as she was trying to sell us services that we were not especially interested in. So we went back to the hotel, but decided in the lobby that we wanted to go to McDonalds. This shouldn’t have been hard, as it was no more than 100 yards away, but apparently we made the lobby staff draw us a map (found the next morning in our room) to McD’s. (Don’t we still have this map somewhere, guys?)
But thankfully we made it! I’m not sure if the map helped or not, but we did met some new friends in line at McD’s. I tried to take a photo of them, but it turns out it’s a movie, so enjoy:
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=324343&server=vimeo.com&fullscreen=1&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=1&color=00ADEF