Sunshine City Aquarium

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July 5th 2013

Published: July 5th 2013

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katybug

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To celebrate the 4th of July - or, not really, but it just so happened that the friend I was going with is military and had the 4th off and it fell on MY day off of Thursday - I went to the Sunshine City aquarium in Ikebukuro! It was really fun, and it was exciting to go back to a part of the city that I hadn't been to since I arrived in Japan a year ago.

We actually had a little trouble finding exactly where we needed to go. We found Sunshine City okay, but nowhere on the side of the building did it list the aquarium, and after some furious google searching, I gave up, used my dictionary to find how to say "aquarium" (suizokukan) and asked the information desk where it was. Hooray for Japanese! The nice woman pointed us through the elevators to another section of the building, and then from THERE, we found all the signs we needed. Of course. We had just gone in non-marked entrance doors, naturally.

I was excited to discover that there was a planetarium as well, though we didn't do it on this trip. I was mostly excited

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for the PENGUINS!! because I love them. We ended up going in right as there was a sea lion show going on, and there really weren't many people there at all, which was fantastic. Part of the aquarium is open-air on the roof of the building, the 10th floor, so that was neat, and we were lucky it had stopped raining for that part. We saw all the great animals and fish, and it was just a really fun experience. I took a lot of pictures! Haha.

After that, we were hungry, so we walked around towards the station and found a cheap, good restaurant to grab some beer and dinner at - because what says 4th of July like beer? Nothing! We did get a bit lost trying to actually FIND the station again, only because he was holding his phone upside-down and we thought we were going east when we were going west. User error, I think (and not me).

Friday nights now, I'm done with my day job at 5 PM, but I've inherited a 9-year-old private lesson that I teach a few stations down at 7 PM. There's nothing cooler than spending my Friday

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nights with a REALLY amazing and wonderful Japanese family, teaching a GREAT kid in their house! It's so much fun to get to be a part of it and see how people here really live, and to be welcomed into a family like this. I really love them, I'm so happy I took this private lesson, seeing as how I don't ever seek private students out on my own. ^____^ It really makes me feel like I am part of this community, and I absolutely adore that feeling!

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