Two weeks later I'm only just getting the hang of just getting around. The tube system here is about London times 5 and the train lines are a mixture of private lines and the national system so you have to keep changing between several different train companies to get on your lines each time paying about £1.50 every time you want to change which makes any journey about £5! Sheeesh. I spent the rest of the weekend hanging out in Harajuku with Tif and Chiri while Soran worked and walking around the massive parks, some which basically seem like forests right in the middle the city. We went to a party on Friday night in a small smoky basement bar with lots of friends of friends and about a third ex Loupe Group massive, mostly market place, who have all returned to Tokyo. It was so weird meeting all these people who have worked for the bars over the years and now meeting them in Tokyo, I'd like to pin point on a world map all the nationalities that have worked for that company and see how many countries you could get. I think we'd run out of pins at Brazil!

I met Ledo, Soran's oldest brother on Saturday, his wife and two kids, Selo and Alia, both really cute but so shy. I think they were expecting a Japanese girl and got really scared by me! It was a familiar feeling that came back to me after making so many children cry in Africa because I was the first white person they had seen. We went to an izakaya in the neighbourhood and sat outside on plastic crates drinking cold beer on the quiet street, I met the other brother Lami and his friends and stayed drinking and eating deep fried salty snacks at Lami's friend's pub, before going back to Lami's house to drink with Shikishi, his wife. We all then made our way back to our house when his parents returned from the bar and wanted see all of us; it is all getting very familiar now and seems like I've become part of the family.

We woke up feeling fragile and had a festival to get to, so in 27C weather the mom dressed me up in a Yukata, tied my bow tight to keep my posture and gave me a fan and a little purse, I felt so funny. It was boiling hot and we were out catching tubes and trains in our yukatas it felt like a bathrobe! We met his old high school friend in a "beer garden" basically astro-turf with plastic tables and chairs, it had a distinct festival feel so it and felt like a typical Sunday waking up tired and hung-over but after a beer right back to normal. All of the friends couldn't speak English so there was a lot of Japanese banter but I feel at the stage now that it doesn't even faze me if I can't understand what any ones saying.

We made our way to the Suja Matsuri, a festival in Asakusa. I was told I was really lucky because its one of the biggest festivals of the year. There were about 100 portable shrines, really ornate, golden mini temples, each weighing a tonne that are carried down the streets by about 40 people with the weight on their shoulders. Each shrine representing a different neighbourhood, so I found the nomura family down the street, drinking and having a whale of a time. The energy was really charged and crazy. It was the first time I had seen any hint of public raucousness in Japan, I even saw a fight, a short lived one but still it was a fight!

The festival lasted into the night and after the sun went down people got even crazier. What was really interesting was that old, young, men and women were all in the same costume carrying the shrine, feeding off of each others energy. The shrine was carried down the streets back to the temple where a finale show goes on that involves swinging the shrine from left to right. I'd never seen anything like it. At the end of the parade was a fair with children's games where kiddies could win gold fish wear anime masks and eat gooey, sickly sweet treats.

We heading to the uncles house in the same neighbourhood where there was a collection of family members that overflowed onto the streets. Most of who were drinking beers, sat on the pavement down a quiet road. We met up with his parents and sat, chatted, drank and relaxed from the chaotic atmosphere of the festival. It felt like being sat on the pavement drinking on Dray Walk after a day at the Sunday market. We headed home tired and hungry and had a late night tempura dinner near the station and all headed home for more relaxing.

I woke up late on Monday and headed to Rappongi Hills, a huge shopping complex, with galleries, shops, restaurants, luxury apartments. I can't even liken it to anything in London, but everything was pristine, awesomely designed and stylish. I visited to Mori Museum on the 53rd floor which displayed modern art with a focus on environmental destruction. The 360 view point over the city was awesome but really scary! I met up with the girls from Sofia to see a movie. Which was wonderful but I'm too ashamed to name it as it's a guilty girly pleasure of all of ours but I'm sure you could guess. We had a meal at a Turkish restaurant, I strolled into the restaurant and after seeing the Turkish waiter I tried to order in English but no wait, he only speaks Japanese! A Turkish man that speaks Japanese and not English! Am I the only one shocked by that? I spotted a reggae bar on the way home that we moved on to. Helplessly cheesy with a Costa del Sol feel, but it was fun. We made friends with some Hawaiian students had shots, smoked shisha and listened to Bob Marley's Exodus. I was proud of Chiri as it was a Monday night; she had mid terms the next day but still having fun. Well done to her for not taking life and exams too seriously I say. We were in the foreigner district which is Tokyo's sin city; Russian strippers, Chinese prostitutes and Nigerian bouncers. The amount of western business men in suits makes it feel like the Big Chill Bar at 6pm flooded with suited groups of irritating city boys from the banks in Liverpool Street getting too drunk, too fast and acting like 19 year old boys.

It felt like a massive meat market; western men looking for cute, submissive Japanese girls and Japanese girls looking for macho, manly, western men. The Japanese girls are a completely different breed of women. They literally look and act like china dolls and look immaculate all the time. You see on the trains women constantly looking in their mirrors and applying make up, they carry round makeup bags bigger than my purse and the pharmacies all filled with every kind of cream, lotion, potion for every part of your face and body. I imagine most Japanese women spending two hours taking their make up off each night then sleeping in these masks they sell everywhere lathered in cream. They aren't being vain or arrogant though it seems more like painful self-consciousness and aspiration to be perfect.

There's also the other dimension of culture of how juvenile everything is. I've seen in cafés 50 year old businessmen reading manga comics, I don't think it matters how old you are, men will always read comic books! I've been told I act so old for my age but that really isn't hard to see because 21 year old girls still carry round teddy bears and attach furry animals and stickers to their phones! It is just bazaar how fluffy, cute and shiny everything is. Even the train approaching sound is chiming bells that make you feel like your waiting for the monorail in the Anaheim Disneyland!

We spent Tuesday at Tokyo Midtown, another complex like Rappongi hills but even fancier! More parks, shops, cafes. It was the fanciest mall I've ever been to in my life. I've been to stunning malls in Bangkok, Johannesburg, Rio but all the time I've felt guilty looking at Rolex watches, luxury perfumes and £500 hand bags when you know a mile away there are people in shacks, townships, favelas living in poverty without adequate sanitation, reliable electricity or clean water. However that is very first world mentality. You know that its still going on somewhere in the world but because it's 3,000miles away compared to 3 miles it makes you feel better because you know you won't encounter the shacks or beggars immediately when you step outside the extravagant shopping complexes. I know a lot of South African's who would take this view.

After walking around in awe at this Tokyo midtown complex I met up with Soran and had dinner at a Mexican joint. The Mexican food here is so much better than in England. Apart from the tequila bar, Café Pacifico in Convent Garden it is really hard to find good Mexican food anywhere in London. We then went on to Brussels, a specialty Belgian beer bar which Soran's cousin manages. She gave us a lot of different tries of the beer that they sell so ended up sampling these really heavy, dark lovely beers. It was really relaxing and interesting as it was in the office district so most of the clientele were western businessmen out drinking with their Japanese counterparts making business deals.

His parents took me out in the car on Wednesday to sightsee around Asakusa, we saw Japan's highest tower they are building called the sky tree that's going to be about 700meters high at the observation deck, and I think I would have to drink at least half a bottle of red wine before someone gets me up there! We saw the massive red lantern which features in a lot of movies and a really tourist market. All of the tour guides were trying to speak English to Soran which he got a kick out of and there were tourist knick-knacks left, right and centre. We spent the after noon in the Edo Tokyo Museum learning about Japans history, the last section which focused on the industrialisation since the Meiji restoration described how the Americans arrived and forced Japan to open their ports and after the second world war and bombing raids America took control and flooded Japan with American foodstuffs which is why the supermarkets are full of American candies and snacks now. There's probably a term that describes this kind of American sugary imperialism.

I watched a Ghibly film, Japan's version of Disney. However the film I saw Princess Monoke was 3 hours long, ultra violent and with quite adult themes however it is still geared towards children. We visited Yokohama which had a very European feel, wide, leafy streets and seaside promenades. It was all really fancy with an oldy world feel. We caught the train back to Shibuya for a friend's promotion party. The party was held in a tiny record store selling LPs, T-shirts and books; it felt exactly like Rough Trade but packed with free sushi, Japanese DJs and one British designer from Old Street who had designed the art work for the record store. After we brought champagne for the dad's 63rd birthday and went to his bar Hambutei, and stayed and drank and sang happy buffsssday with all the regulars in very broken English.

Tokyo has been wonderful so far, it really feels like home and I am slowly beginning to get the hang of everything and dealing with the Japanese system. Its so amazingly different one can only come to see how strange and weird everything is. But I like it here. I'm off to China for a week and will hopefully get to see everyone I want to and am really excited about the World Cup. Not a big football fan but living in South Africa when there were so many doubts about how the country would handle the crowds, transport and crime levels and now everything is unravelling perfectly makes me really happy to see. It's really quite something for Africa as it's the first world cup the continent has hosted and hopefully all with go smoothly without the hiccups which everyone has anticipated.