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Published: August 22nd 2008
VENDING MACHINES!!!
It's true. They're EVERYWHERE. And it's awesome. Here are some random ones on the side of the road on our way to the restaurant.Hi everyone!
Sorry that it's taken me a few days to post a new entry. We had to do a speech for school and I've been spending a lot of time writing and memorizing it, so I've been quite busy. But don't worry--it's definitely not all work and no play! 😉 I'm sure you could have figured that out, though. Alright, well, down to business. I'll be picking up this time with my 2nd weekend here in Tsuru. We begin our tale with a quiet Friday evening...
Friday:
After class, we didn't do much until the evening, when a few of us decided to go to a restaurant that one of the tutors(Mikity--I know. Great name, right?) works at. The name of the restaurant is Yumeman. It was the same restaurant that Allison and I went to with our host families the week before. We enjoyed a nice meal and then headed back to the apartments to watch the opening ceremonies of the Olympics! Allison is the only one of us who has a couch in her room, so we met the group to watch there. I don't know if you all watched the opening ceremonies or not,
Bonsai!!!
How cool is this tree? It was just on a lawn on the side of the street--pretty neat, eh? but daaaaang. It was amazing. We all watched together until all the different countries' teams started entering the stadium, and then people started leaving to get ready for bed because we had plans to go to Tokyo the next day and were leaving fairly early. I left Allison's after the American team walked through and headed back to my room to zonk out for the night.
Saturday:
I woke up at the ungodly hour of 7 am (half-an-hour earlier than I have to get up for school--yuck!) and was out the door by 8:45 to get to the train station and head to Tokyo! All of us Californians went, along with 4 of the tutors. Altogether, it's about 2 hrs to Tokyo by train and you have to switch at Otsuki station. There, we bought a day pass, which was about $20 and allowed us to take the trains all over Tokyo as much as we wanted. Overall, the whole trip's transportation was fairly cheap at about $25. Sweet! Public transportation here is seriously the way to go.
Our first stop in Tokyo was Harajuku. Most of the people in our group had not been there yet,
Chowin' down
Michelle and Vanessa getting ready to eat at Yumeman. Michelle's food came on this cool portable skillet thing. You could actually control how high the flame was under the plate. so we did some shopping and gawking at the interesting outfits parading up and down Aoyama Dori. We ate lunch in a little food court that was packed to the gills. The funniest part was the ratio of girls to guys. As in, in this food court there were absolutely no guys besides our group's. And they were pretty much all middle/high school age. It was pretty funny. You could definitely see the demographic that the Harajuku area plays to.
After we were done with our window shopping in Harajuku, we walked a little ways past the train station to a Meiji-era shrine. It was really beautiful just walking up to it. It was kind of like Golden Gate Park or Central Park in New York--tons of city around you, but this beautiful little patch of green in the middle. On the path on the way to the shrine, there were a couple cool things to see, including a big display of tons of old Sake barrels brightly painted and a HUGE Tori gate that we stopped to take a group shot next to. On our way in, we did the traditional washing of the hands and mouth and
Pokemon Train
We actually rode on this super-cool train. As a promotion to get kids to ride during their Summer vacation, the train did a whole Pokemon promotional thing. You would see all kinds of kids at the train station walking around with Pikachu hats on. I'm not gonna lie...I kinda wanted one. stopped to check out the Omamori (charms that bring various forms of good luck to those who buy them). Inside, it was really amazing to see the beautiful architecture. Walking in through the first door, a huge courtyard paved in white stone spread out before you with the main part of the shrine directly in front of you. To the right, there was an area for people to write their prayers and hang them. It was fascinating to see all the different languages the prayers were written in and just how many of them there were. Heading up the steps at the back of the courtyard, we wandered through a second set of doors to another open-air smaller area. At this point, we couldn't walk forward any farther, as it was blocked off since this is sort of an altar. Many of our group tossed a coin into the boxes and did the traditional "clap, clap" and offered a prayer. Michelle was happy to find a giant Taiko drum (she plays in San Diego and has actually found a group here to play with, also) and we all made her pose with it and snapped pictures.
We left the
the group at Harajuku
A quick pic of everyone besides the two photographers before we walked into the main street of Harajuku. tranquility of the temple and walked back to the train station to catch a train to Akihabara. Akihabara is known for its electronic retail and many of the people in our group wanted to buy electronic English to Japanese dictionaries, but I was just excited to see what would surely be another bustling part of Tokyo! Akihabara certainly didn't disappoint. There was no lack of neon lights and people. We got there in the late afternoon and it had become cloudy, so the neon lights really stood out. We wandered around for a bit and saw a Japanese girl-band playing at a little outdoor concert. They seemed to have a hardcore following of fans. There were some outdoor food/drink vendors in the area and the guys in our group were happy to find a tent selling cheap beer. (They're all about the Japanese beer--it's pretty funny.)
From there, we headed to the building that we came for--Yodobashi Akiba. It's basically Best Buy if it were 20 times bigger. However, on our way I made my first Sailor Moon sighting! We passed by a store that was selling Sailor Moon costumes and one of the tutors took pictures of me
outside my favorite Harajuku store
This store is ridiculous. It has the most sequinned, crazy costume-ish clothes ever. I love it. with each window. She insisted that I had to take one with every single costume. I'm pretty sure that she and everyone else could tell how excited I was from the way I jumped about 5 feet off the ground and squealed when I saw the window with the first outfit in it. I got thoroughly teased for a while, but it was worth it. 😊
Anyway, back to Yodobashi Akiba, a.k.a. Best Buy on steroids. It's got 7 floors worth of electronics and each floor is about the size of a Best Buy. Seriously. It was overwhelming. They had an entire Tower Records (which, apparently has not gone out of business there...strange, huh?) inside the store. While the dictionary seekers went to get there stuff, we perused the music selection at Tower. Me and one of the guys liked a band that one of the tutors liked, so she's made us a CD to put on our computers. The band is called "Greeeeen". Awesome name, right? 😊
After everyone had made their purchases, we headed back to the train station. It was getting to be dinner time and someone suggested Hard Rock Cafe which was only a
nature meets city
The group walking on the path to the Meiji-era shrine beside Harajuku. couple of stops away. American food definitely sounded delicious to all of us, so off we went! The Hard Rock was at Ueno's train station, which was pretty cool. I was dying for a cheeseburger and was happy to get my fix. After that, we decided it was time to call it a night. It had been a long day, so we hopped on the train and left for our shuffle back to Tsuru. Some of the group had plans to get together when we got back, but the majority of us were dead tired, including myself, so I crashed as soon as we got back.
Sunday:
BBQ TIME!!! We got together with the tutors for a lunch BBQ. It took us probably an hour to get the charcoal lighted in the little grill. At first, they didn't have lighter fluid, so there was absolutely no hope. It was pretty funny to watch. After we got grilling, we discovered we had waaaaaaaaaay to much food. It was DELICIOUS though. We had all sorts of meat and vegies and s'mores for dessert. It was definitely fun and tasty all at the same time. And we discovered a love only
my artsy shot
I couldn't resist--this little girl was so cute and it made such a great pic! second to Kirin's milk tea--known among us only as "the meat sauce." It's delicious and goes on pretty much anything. Will the wonders of Japanese food never cease?
Robin, one of the guys in our group, mentioned that there was a meteor shower that was supposed to be going on for the next few days that was starting that night, so the group made plans to go watch in a good star-gazing spot the tutors knew about. We met them at about 10 that night and headed out under an ominously cloudy sky to a spot up a road a little ways behind the school. By the time we got to the area they were thinking of, the road had taken us up above the town a little ways. At this little park on the side of a hill, we stared up at the sky in anticipation. Unfortunately, with most of the sky covered in clouds, we only spotted a couple of shooting stars. And we were all getting bit by the local insect population, so we walked back down the mountain to leave the star-gazing for another night. Besides, an early school day the next morning beckoned threateningly
A LOT of Sake
Pretty cool looking display. I swear I'm only smiling because it looked cool--I'm pretty sure all the barrels were empty. ;) and we needed to get our sleep.
Thus, another epic weekend on Megan's great adventure came to a close. What will happen to our beloved world-traveler next? Stay tuned...😉
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