Prettiness!

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So I had me a date with Mayumi last night. We went out to eat at the restaurant we TRIED to eat at last time (but they were closing). It's a neat little place that serves pasta and desserts. Pizza is WEIRD here! We ordered a pizza to share, and I guess it's standard to have VERY thin crusts. Like, our "thin crust" pizzas are probably a touch thicker than their normal crusts. And they put strange stuff on their pizza! We ordered a bacon and asparagus pizza (it also had corn and mayonnaise on it). It actually tasted very good, but just the idea of it was quite weird to me, hehe ;p Afterwards, we indulged in some of their desserts. I tell you, the Japanese know how to present their desserts! I just wanted to order the whole dessert page, everything looked SO pretty/yummy! In the end, we ordered a slice of this strawberry cake, and a cup of strawberry... I dunno. The top half was gelatin, and the bottom half was like a strawberry flavored bavarian cream. Heh. It felt weird in your mouth, but it tasted good! When we were done eating, we were wondering what to do, and I recalled reading about how Yokohama has the biggest ferris wheel in the world, so I wanted to go see it at least, if not ride on it. By the time we got there, it was closed (the last people were getting off), but at least I got to see it up close. Mayumi and I have made plans to head out earlier one day and go on it while we also just have fun at the amusement park that it's a part of. When we finished there, we went for a walk past it to see the ocean, and walked along the shore (well, the cement walkway that lined the shore) near the navy base in Yokohama. It was very romantic, with very few lights in the area, and it's apparently a very popular "date" location, as we could see couples peppered thruout the area. We noticed the time, and had to unfortunately start making our way back home, lest we miss the last trains, and on the way back, we walked thru an english flower garden-- it was SO incredibly pretty! It had pillars of flowers 2 stories high, and 30 foot designs of hearts and such made outta flowers, all laced with cute little walkways and little white benches for people to sit on. I really have to go back to this whole area during the day when I can take pictures of all these things. (All I had with me at the time was my keitai, which is pretty normal. Most of my pictures from my digicam have been around the house), and the keitai doesn't have a flash (but it DOES have an annoying shutter sound you can't turn off. Apparently, it's law to not be able to turn it off, because of perverts taking pictures up girls' skirts on trains and such) We got back to the train station and went our seperate ways to get back to our respective homes. She was so cute, emailing me once in a while to make sure I was getting home alright, because she was worried about me not understanding the trains very well. Despite that I've told her the route I was taking I was INCREDIBLY comfortable with, and take very often.

I went and met Yuka-san again for dinner the other night. Originally the plan was that I would meet her and her friend Yuuko-san for dinner, then Yuuko-san had other plans, and we would meet her other friend Rika-san for karaoke. Unfortunately, Yuuko-san had to cancel since her mother was feeling ill, but I still got to see Yuka-san, and since we started dinner late, Rika-san joined us shortly into it. The restaurant type was called an Izakaya, and the closest western equivalent is and English pub. Basically the idea is that you go there and the staple food is beer and other alcohols (since the primary reason to go is to drink), but you will find the menus are filled with a delightful assortment of colorful dishes and foods in small portions, not unlike that of Dim-Sum for chinese food. The thing with Japanese is that the majority of the time when they "go out drinking", it almost guaranteed will involve eating as well. Poor Yuka was so cute when we were drinking-- she told me that normally she can drink okay, but whenever she drinks a "sour" type drink, it makes her face red after not even 1 drink (and I've found out that it seems that is usually paired with her face feeling hot). But she ordered a Honey & Lemon Sour anyways, and after about half of it, she was complaining about her face being hot, hehe. It only had a slight flush color to it, but it was SO cute! By the time Rika-san had joined us, all we had really done was ordered our drinks (and not even receieved them yet), so she didn't really miss anything-- I got to practice some more serious Japanese, as Rika-san doesn't speak english very well at all (but she sounded so cute when she tried!). She got all excited when she found out that I use Mixi, a Japanese social networking website that I've been using for a year or 2 in order to make some Japanese friends online before I got here. She immediately asked my mixi name so she could search for me via her keitai. Needless to say, we are now on each other's friends lists ;p So I tried some more new foods there, it seems that pumpkin is either "in season", or the Japanese have a fetish for it. This is the 2nd or 3rd place I've been to with a Pumpkin food of some sort. This one was pumpkin chunks in some kinda creamy sauce. It was incredibly good. We also ordered another strange pizza- again with asparagus, but it had other things on it too, that currently escape my memory. And mayonnaise. Yuka-san told me that the Japanese -really- like mayonnaise for some reason. We also got these cheese bacon roll things-- they were SOOO good! Bacon wrapped around cheese and .. something. I don't know what it was, but it was basically filler. 2 of these rolls skewered on a stick.

After that, we met up with Toshi for karaoke. Japanese karaoke is very different from North American karaoke is that you "rent" a room with your own personal karaoke machine for a certain amount of time. Inside you'll find some padded benches (think restaurant booths) and a table, and in the corner, a TV and karaoke machine. Up near the ceiling is a climate control machine, and you've given a remote for it. Additionally, the karaoke machine has a remote queuing system for it so you don't have to get up and run to it every time you wanna queue up a song. It's this handy wireless device that also has an electronic listing of the songs available so you don't have to look thru the books. At least at the particular place _WE_ went to, we were asked up front what drinks we'd like, and about 5 minutes after getting into our room, they were brought out to us. I'm not sure if we can order more or not, but it didn't matter cause by the time we were done, we all had to gulp down the last of ours anyways. I've hard that you can order drinks/food to your karaoke box tho. We stayed late enough that we had to be in a little bit of a rush afterwards to make the last trains to our various destinations.

Saturday, I had arranged for meeting up with a foreigner group called "Tokyo Gaijins", which is just basically a group run by 1 guy who sends out emails to anybody who signs up for it, telling them about various events in and around Tokyo to go to, and providing information, and other gaijins to meet up with to just have a good time. Saturday's "meeting" was for Ohanami, and at the time I heard about the meeting, I had conveniently also planned to meet a Japanese friend (and her best friend) at the exact same time, and closeby, so I reserved 3 spots in the Tokyo Gaijin Ohanami party for us. It cost us $25 each to attend, and it included drinks/food. There was WAY more beer/chu-hi (kinda like coolers) than we could all drink (total count of reserved people was 105, plus any "at the door" showups), and probably 2 or 3 (or 4?) dozen pizzas, haha. I didn't take a huge amount of pictures since there wasn't really a good view of the cherry blossoms at that particular location. While there, I met a camera otaku (uhm... geek, essentially) from finland with a _REALLY_ strong finnish accent. It's funny hearing Japanese spoken with a rolling "r". And a friend of his, a cute Japanese girl named Eriko, who is also a bit of a camera otaku, and a little bit of a video game fan as well. She was really interested in hearing about my Final Fantasy 6 project^^ And she made sure that every Japanese girl there had it pointed out to them that I looked like Orlando Bloom. And apparently some famous figure skater as well, but hell if I know who that is. We all stuck around at that park (which was stupidly busy- groups of people every 50 feet or so) until it closed at 5pm. (At least, that's what I had heard.. we planned to leave at 5 anyways) Toshi came by to say hi and see who showed up, and kindly offered us a ride to a coffee shop where we could get something warm to drink (poor Eriko was cold), and head out to another really famous ohanami location to see some serious flower-age. Now THAT place was packed! It was stupid. The was a lineup a block long to just get INTO the path that leads along the side of the river with all the sakura (cherry trees) on either side of it. From the path you can see that people are renting boats and going out for romantic boat rides (oars and such- not powerboats) while watching the sakura. The path we were on goes UNDER a huge row of Sakura on the edge of the river, and it's probably 1 or 2 km long, at a guess. It was really hard to measure a guess tho since we were constantly stopping to take pictures, not to mention everybody else as well. It was kinda humorous tho, there's guys paid to just stand there with megaphones saying "please keep moving, don't stop! We need to keep the line moving!", and everybody was ignoring them, and constantly stopping to take pictures/pose/etc.. Also kinda humorous was there was a couple of low-hanging branches (huge branches- you can't ignore them- like 12" diameter) that had the yellow and black tape wrapped around them to bring them to attention, but they were way too high for Japanese people to worry about, so the tape was obviously there for us stupid foreigners^^ We walked the length of the path, and my Finnish friend (Markus) knew that last year there was a really good place on the other side of the river, so we made our way over there. It was nowhere NEAR as crowded, and romantically, a MUCH better choice.. less lights, little park benches to sit on, and a great view of the river/boats/people walking the sakura path on the other side. During our walk on THIS side of the river, we encountered maybe 2 dozen couples total for the length of it. Markus seemed to really like the view of the Sakura better from this side, but I liked the view of the Sakura from close-up better. This side was DEFINATELY the place to take a girl for a romantic walk tho. A fancy park with winding paths, park benches, dotted occassionally with lights, but typically pretty dark..

When our sakura walk ended, Markus and Eriko walked me to the closest station and gave me some pointers on how to get to the station I wanted to get to, to meet Toshi again. Tokyo trains are a touch confusing! I'll take a picture of a map later. Anyways, I made it to meet Toshi, and he picked me up in his car, where his best friend was waiting. Keisuke, I believe is the spelling of his name. Very cool guy, and he speaks a bit of english as well, so practiced when he could while I practiced what Japanese I could as well. We drove out and picked up Keisuke-san's girlfriend, and the 4 of us went out to eat at a yakiniku (uhm.. literally: cooked meat) restaurant. We have the occassional yakiniku restaurant in Canada, it has tables with built-in grills, and they bring out raw meat for you to cook yourself at the table, along with other dishes, rice, pickles, etc.. Afterwards we headed out to Keisuke's flat to just hang out. We rented a movie, The Sentinal, and headed up to his flat. It's in a building less than 1 year old, on the 34th floor (maybe 5 floors from the top?), and has an AMAZING view of downtown Tokyo. I was telling Toshi that I swear he pays thru the nose for it, and Toshi informed me that I was right! It's like $2700/month! And it's a small, 1 room flat. AMAZING tho. The building has a massive entrance with a few couches/tables, and marble walls/floors, and at the faaaaaaaaar end, a guy sitting behind a desk, in a suit to let you thru the 15 foot high doors into the elevator room. We had to take 2 elevators up to his floor. The hallways are at least 20 feet wide- this is an EXPENSIVE building. Everything is pristine. He has a pull down screen for a projector TV, so it was effectively like a 10-13 foot TV of pretty decent quality. We played some Nintendo Wii for an hour or so, my first experience with that! It was pretty cool, actually.. He had some disc with 5 sports games on it. Boxing/Tennis/Bowling... uhm, don't remember the rest. We just played tennis and boxing tho. After that we watched the movie, and it was pretty late and we were all pretty tired, so Toshi and I headed out to his parent's place in Yokohama to sleep.

Since it was really late when we got there, we also woke up really late, which is unfortunate since it was such an incredible day out.. But that's okay, since a lot of my point to being here in Japan is just to relax- I don't have to worry about hurrying up to do anything specific, and I really won't feel bad if I miss some of the sights, since I'm here to see the ones that are convenient, and to relax, and just generally have fun. Come suppertime, both myself and Toshi had other plans, so he dropped me off at Shinagawa station in Tokyo. The thing about Tokyo trains is that there's one line (the Yamanote line) that goes in a loop around central Tokyo. All the other lines kinda shoot all over the place. So whenever you're on the Yamanote line, it doesn't matter which way you go, cause you'll eventually get to where you wanna be- it's just a matter of how long it will take. Anyways, the Shinagawa station that Toshi dropped me off at is on the Yamanote line. Not that it really has any bearing on anything since I didn't even go INTO the station. My friend Satty happened to be sent out from Hokkaido (waaaay northern Japan island) to Tokyo for work, and her hotel is right close to the Shinagawa station- so we met there and went to dinner at a "Hamburger steak" restaurant. This is something that we don't really have .. kinda, in Canada. It's sorta like a giant hamburger patty, but it's prepared and served to you just like a steak, Fork and knife, BBQ sauce maybe, potatoes, etc.. I got a "german hamburger steak", which came with a sunny-side-up egg on top of the steak. It was very good! I'd highly recommend trying the hamburger steaks to anybody, since it's not a very far cry from standard Canadian foods, so most people should love it^^

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Photos

Yay flowers~
This is probably one of the better shots of the sakura that I took, but I don't remember for sure where it was... @_@

Crazy people are fun!
This is a guy we saw when we were walking from the meeting place to the actual site we were having the ohanami party at. He had a little boombox playing some english song (don't remember what), and he was singing along out loud, shaking his head around, and dancing with the wall. He was everybody's hero^^

Our group at the TokyoGaijins ohanami meet
This is probably on the order of 1/3 of the people who were at the ohanami meeting at the time of the photo (it was taken early and not everybody was there yet). You can see me on the left side talking with Emiko-san.. She speaks great english, and is a pretty interesting person in general^^
The girl in the white jacket sitting behind me, and looking over her shoulder is the friend I was actually meeting before I knew about the ohanami meeting, her name is Kaori-san. To the right of her (but hard to see because of Emiko-san) is her best friend that she brought along. The girl to the right of Emiko-san got SOOO drunk at ohanami, she would crawl up to random ppl and put her head on their laps to nap. Cute^^

The richest guy at the ohanami meet!
This is Ricky, the event organizer for Tokyo Gaijins- these was such a perfect shot of him since it's relatively well known that these events are pretty cheap to hold, but he collects a respectable sum of money from all who attend. In this case, $25-$30 per person, and there was probably about 120 people there. That money paid for a buncha pizza and booze, but I'll bet you he walked away with a hefty sum of money *grin* Good idea Ricky- I wanna do this kinda thing^^

An accident, I swear!
I know that it's fairly stereotypical for Canadian guys to give the finger when their photos are being taken, but actually this one was a bit of a mistake! I was telling Markus about it, and merely demonstrating, when he quickly took a shot.

Who needs Kool-aid cults when you can have pringles and beer cults!
This was decidedly a must-have photo by myself, Markus, and Emiko, as we were leaving the ohanami meeting with Toshi. Such a picturesque shot of what TOTALLY looked like a cult leader preaching to some would-be cultists! They were paying WAY too close of attention^^

Daytime flowers
It was really difficult to take any photos of the sakura during the daytime since it was a little overcast and the clouds were the same color as the flowers most of the time>< At this time, the clouds happened to change in brightness a bit, and I gave it a shot. Much better than the other attempts I had made earlier, but still not that great since there wasn't really any huge concentrations of sakura in the area, unfortunately;;

More sakura!
I took -waaay- too many pictures of flowers today! This is another shot I found in the same park we had the party in. Higher concentration of flowers here, too bad there wasn't anywhere to sit..

There's a lot of people in this park!
Another shot of some of the people in our group at the party. As an added bonus, in the background, you can see loads of other people not associated with us, who were also there just to enjoy ohanami. This park must be pretty popular for this.
sidenote: The girl in the purple top who's only partially on the left side of this picture was REALLY drunk, and her face was -really- red from drinking. No, more red than that- I don't think you understand. I mean RED! No, dammit! I said _RED_!

Markus
Here's Markus, the crazy finnish guy with the super-strong accent (yay for rolling Rs in Japanese!)

Tokyo Gaijins
Another shot of the people meeting for ohanami as we were leaving.

Sakura blanket
This is a shot I took from the super-crowded path alongside the river-- as you can see, the other side is almost literally blanketed with sakura, and you can't see it here, but so is this side.
You can also see the hoards of people who've rented boats nearby for a romantic night..

Sakura blanket part deux
A shot of the blanket of sakura above the super-crowded path, FROM the super-crowded path^^

Boycott fake pink flowers!
At night, they shine big lights on the sakura flowers to make for prime picture taking. It's better at night than during the day!
Technically, the flowers are a very soft pink, but they basically look white. I saw these ones, but when I got close, I realized that it's actually a pink light that they're shining on them. I took only this picture for informational purposes, and from this time on, I'm boycotting all but the REAL pink sakura flowers.

Comments

[Dad]

Japan
Hi son, you should become a "writer"! Looks like you are having a great time there, have fun, relax, and have a great holiday!

[Denise]

Karaoke
Karaoke sounds way cooler over there. Sounds like your having a real blast! Woohoo.. :)