After some indecisive meandering, Ben left us to our own devices and went home to sleep. We immediately stepped into the nearest restaurant, a cozy little ramen place. And then we proceeded to take a good long time figuring out what parts of the menu said and which meals looked good in the pictures on the menu. Robert and I ordered the same thing, ramen with chicken. Gerry wasn't very hungry, so he went for something smaller; the server probably though Gerry was weird for ordering a side-dish even after they asked "Just this?" Ramen, real ramen, is not at all like the packaged noodles and salty powder you can get for about 20 cents back in the States. (Although it holds a dear place in the heart of my palate, and I've kind of been craving extremely cheap, albeit salt-watery, partial-meals.) The broth is thicker and creamier, similar to Campbell's cream of chicken soup, in terms of consistency. It also came with small slabs of chicken which I compulsively broke into smaller pieces so I could enjoy it throughout the course of the ramen-consumption.
On another note, related only by Campbell's soup, there's a hilarious magnet on the guesthouse fridge which replaces Campbell's with "Eatery", and the soup name with "Miso Horny Sushi". It whas very funny.
After we gochisosama deshita-ed and paid, we ventured back out onto the streets. Next we explored the Wonder Tower. Not really much of a tower, just seven floors of games: a couple of stories in the middle are for gambling, but the rest are devoted to arcade games and claw machines.
Mission accomplished: play DDR in a Japanese arcade
The second floor had a DDR machine. It had a good number of selections from every edition of DDR, I think. Being a creature of habit, I stuck with mostly DDR Max 2 songs: Destiny, I feel..., Dive. And Butterfly. Mochiron. (I couldn't find any Breakdown, which was sad-making. But then I probably wasn't looking hard enough.)
We went up another couple of floors to ze video games. Robert and Gerry played a few rounds of Tekken 6. (I don't know all that much about Tekken, but the stages are pretty impressive.) There was also this MMO-RPG arcade game, Shining Force Cross by Sega. It's very Square-Enix-looking, but not. The new Square-Enix game which was in Wonder Tower's arcade is called Lord of Vermillion II, which is actually a collectible card game. Imagine playing Magic the Gathering on an arcade game.
A little bit before midnight, we finally started heading back towards the subway station. Unbeknownst to our intrepid travelers, the eki closes down at midnight; we arrived just as they were starting to shut things down. Oh crap. Hilarity ensued as we tried walking to another station in the hopes that it was only one closing down. Yes, we were that naive and hopeful. We stared at maps, went in the wrong direction, then the right direction, and eventually flagged down a taxi, only to be embarrassed trying to explain where we wanted him to drop us off. We asked for Daitokuji, a temple only a couple of streets over from the guesthouse, but then he asked us where in particular around the temple grounds. We mumbled for a bit to each other, trying to be more specific. When we mentioned Kitaoji (a nearby street and station), he latched onto it, but then drove us a little past where we needed to be dropped off.We got home...eventually.
