a night in shibuya

A NIGHT IN SHIBUYA

It’s almost Halloween, back in the USA where I studied for the last 3 years, at this point of the time you can already see a lot of Halloween decorations. From downtown atmosphere to school starbucks, it’s always surrounded by this magical holiday. Luckily I’m in Tokyo, the place where Halloween is a must dress-up as well. From professors to newspapers, the place everybody recommends you to go for the Halloween weekend is Shibuya.

Before the Halloween holiday, I’ve only been to Shibuya once for a dinner meeting with my Chinese friends. My memory of Shibuya is just a place with the famous Shibuya crossing, not a super fancy place like Shinjuku but a place with many delicious restaurants. After the night of the Halloween weekend everything changed.

I’m in a club in Sohpia university called Sophia Communication, members have lunch 3 times a week together to talk about different cultures and interesting things about japan or their lives. They have big events every month, from hiking to trips around Tokyo, and for October they have a Halloween party in Shibuya on 10/31.

After I picked up a costume at Donkihote, a magician costume, I was ready to shine the night, our dorm had a small party from 4 to 6 which suits me perfectly because the party at Shibuya starts at 6:30, everyone in the dorm had already dressed up.

You can see that a lot of people in the dorm like to play with makeup as fake blood which is a pretty genius idea. However I do not like the feeling of something sticking on my face for more than 10 seconds. Needless to say I rejected the idea of having paints on my face, but I did put some on my arm just for fun. After a couple of soft drinks and cookies I was ready to go to Shibuya with my friends to enjoy the night!

As we arrived in Shibuya station, the girls had nowhere to change their costumes because all the restrooms in the station was closed and not allowed to change.  So we had to go to 7 eleven to change, as you can imagine the place was crowded. And it was at a point where if we didn’t hold each other’s hand we would get separated by the crowd. Every inch of the Shibuya crossing was covered by nothing more than dressed people. While we were on our way, we had the luxury to see a lot of well-dressed people around us. Many of them was taking pictures with each other. I had the chance on our way to take a few with many well prepared strangers, the most we seen was joker and little red riding hood for the costumes at Shibuya.

After 40 minutes walking which was supposed to be 15 min on google map, we finally arrived at the party sohpia communication had prepared for us. We were in a small club that was booked specifically for us, there was music and movies playing on the screen tvs around us. Everyone was talking to each other, complementing on each others costumes and how the “traffic” outside was stuck. For the last 30 minutes of the party we played games sharing the love of Halloween, I even won a small souvenir to brag about when we left the party at 9.

At that time the crowd outside wasn’t as much as when it was 6, the funny part was that as we were getting out of the club, there were a group of people dressing like Donald trump and Hilary Clinton and arguing with each other, it sure captured everyone’s attention and gave us all a good laugh.

The train was indeed packed with thousands of people on one train, but I safely arrived home before 12, I think this was a great experience but to be honest I don’t know if I want to do this again as I have no idea how I survived the crowd that was swallowing me!