Mayumi and Alice return

As one would only guess, I slept in really late the next day, but that's ok, it's Saturday. I woke up in time for Lunch, and soon Roberto went to pick up Mayumi and Alice. When they came back we soon went out for Korean pit grill, there was a great place right down the street, and they hadn't tried it before, but it was terrific.


They also got me some Okinawa candies like Mango Kit Kats which is really weird. They also got some Okinawa bannas's which I had one this morning, they were small but flavorable. They made me Taco rice which was interesting and good, had burgers for dinner, and some Okinawa Pineapple wine and these violet potato desserts, along with Okinawa Apple pie and Pineapple bread, it was all good.


Other than food, I've been working hard to update my blog today up to my current state. Now I just have to work on the other parts of my blog I missed, which I'll do throughout the week, so keep watching, and look in the later pages for updates.

Night on the town

In between my classes, I decided to go searching out for some great food. I went a way I'd only been down a few times but haven't really explored and found some cool things along the way.

Random boy street fishing

Weeping willow dying of the heat

Nice fountain

I quickly found what I wanted to eat, and decided to search a bit since I had the time. I found a great shopping area across many crosswalks, I swear there were about five of them. But over there I got some McDonalds french fries, need to stop eating here so much ><;. I grabbed a Lucky Cider, a Sprite type drink, and went back for were I wanted my main food, it was at this place where a bunch of stands were set up for the salarymen and the students to eat at, and I got a handmade avacado burger that was super awesome. After an uneventful week, I decided that tonight I would absolutely have a good time. After popping into the Comic circle for the meeting I went out to meet up with my friends, Zach, Jim, and introducing Kazuya a Japanese friend of Zach's. I was smart and left my backpack in a locker at Shinjuku so I didn't have to lug it around. We first went to the Hub English Pub, and it was happy hour, so we grabbed some good drinks there, and they were big and tasty. I got Kahlua Milk, a person favorite, some Southern Comfort which was excellent, and some Cassis Soda. Kazuya tried to hit on some girls with no luck. We then decided it would be too expensive to keep drinking like this, so we went to the convenience store and picked up some whiskey and coke, oh and an extremely tasty pizza flavored steam bun. The whiskey was nasty but I finished mine and had some of Zach's who didn't like it as much this time. We then played Rock Paper Scissors (a popular game to decide things here, called Junkin Poi here) to see who would talk to the next girl. Poor Kazuya lost and got shot down again. We then went to pick up Kathryn and Gina when Kazuya ran into one his his friends. She didn't stay long but did say she thought Zach was the best looking of us, ouch to me lol. We played Junkin again, and this time Zach lost, but he didn't finish his turn till much later. We then met up with another of Kazuya's friend who could speak english well, and he hung out with us for the rest of the night. We went with him and somehow ended up in a department store,
Zach tryin on some hats and alookin like Gilligan

so we left there and on the way out we met some girls who talked to us because I was wearing my Sophia University t-shirt, and they went there. We became friends, but they were off to karaoke, but not before being asked to friend her on FB, my nickname from her is Danger lol.

While waiting for Kathryn, Kazuya saw another friend who had a bit too much to drink. We tried to comfort her and Kathryn showed up while we were doing this. Kazuya stayed with her, and his friend took us to this hidden place where they served 180 yen beers, way cheap. Kazuya met back up with us, and so did Gina eventually. Some other guy sat with us, have no clue who, but he stuck around the rest of the night. Zach and Jim decided to hit on a group of girls in the back with no prevail. I started talking to the people around are table, one group knew Kathryn from her Japanese 101 class, And I talked to this girl behind me along with some of the other people at her table, and got the number of this blond chick who sat with us for a bit, no pic. I then talked to these people on the other side of the room, and they liked me and wanted to meet my friends as well, so I introduced them and turns out one of the guy's name was Kazuya as well.




We then left that place and went for karaoke, but Zach and Jim decided to play it safe and catch the train, seeing Zach has missed it twice now. We get there, but only stayed for about half an hour, enough to get some good songs in.




We also picked up some quick McDs before leaving, just a cheeseburger and small fries for me. We went to the station where I picked up my bag, and said goodbye to them. I then caught my express train back, one of the last ones. To my dismay though, the Tama-Sen, the train line I have to switch and go one stop is done for the night, boo. So off I go on an adventure to make it one stop down. The way was long with many up and down paths, and a few times I went the wrong way but figured it out quickly, and only once did I think I was lost because the road ended, but I kept following the train track, and eventually hit the river I went cherry blossom viewing at, so I knew the way home at that point, thankfully, but it was still a bit of a walk up-hill from there ><

I made it home and after guzzling down some much needed water, I went to bed.

Hiroshima trip planning

This won't be anywhere as long as the last post Wednesday we went to our meeting with CIEE to lay out the Hiroshima trip. Group B goes this weekend and Group in a few weeks. We watched the beginning of a film about Hiroshima and was given our schedule of events. Best part is we're going to a place called Okonomiyaki town, yum.

But this was just hilarious. Mark came into the class dressed as the pinku sentai ranger.

Zach: WTF MATE!?


Pink: Be sure to drink your Dr. Pepper

We then got a few drinks in the park before I left for home, and Zach and Jim went to watch the rest of the movie and presentation and told me it was boring.

On a side note, one of my Friends Charlie comes in one day this week bandaged up in what looks like bed sheet bandaged sling and cast, apparently he fell off his bike because the breaks weren't working, luckily he landed right in front of a hospital lol

I also finally got my Tickets for the Pillows, the tickets had been sold out almost immediately for the other places they played at, but I got mine for a later event. I tried to pick them up at the place they played but they didn't sell tickets there, and I ended up getting the tickets at another venue seeing that one sold out and were auctioning up to $150 ><;. It was a hard process getting the tickets, had to pay at one konbini, and then pick them up at another, but I was proud of myself figuring out the all Japanese machine at the Family Mart were I finally picked up the tickets.

Also another adventure I had was getting more money, or else I couldn't go out on Fri, so i spent Thur trying to get out enough money for hopefully the rest of the trip or at least a great majority of it. Unfortunately when I tried to get 50,000 Yen out, it was just barely over my daily limit, and I wasn't aware of this. I called Fifth Third using Skype Out and talked to them to figure out the issue, and got my daily limit raised for the time being, and I made the representative laugh when I told her I was using Skype out and the call was no problem coming from Japan.

Also Mayumi, Alice, and Mayumi's mother are out this week in Okinawa, so me and Roberto get to watch Mayumi's mother's cat for the week, he is like the black and grey Garfield.

The Panasonic Center and the Edo-Tokyo Museum, and later Hookah in Shinjuku

I woke up late on Friday morning since I wanted to sleep in. Roy was going to try and use his museum passes as much as possible today since they were going to expire, so he had already gone to the aquarium, and was about to go to the Panasonic center. I decided to meet up with him, and had to navigate my way there. I was able to with my handy DSi Train Map app, but forgot to get off and one of the stops, and since I was on the super express train, I ended up all the way in Yokohama, which is far out of the way, so I had to take another local train back which took some time, thankfully Roy was behind as well. I saw some cool things on the way back though like a huge baseball park with like ten baseball fields,

and a playground made of old tires and they even had a dinosaur made out of tires, wish I could have taken a picture of that but was on the train and couldn't get my camera ready in time...


Cool building by the Panasonic Center

I met up with him at the Panasonic center

and it was cool, had a lot of high tech gadgets and the whole place was awesome, to bad they didn't allow pictures, the most I can show you is this one in the free discover area and a pic they took of me at the end.

Upstairs they had a big learning thing science center, with interactive stuff everywhere, and they gave us these devices that would explain what we were looking at. The was a light color shooter game in the corner at the beginning along with holographic gems, in the center was a giant spinning black light picture where you could adjust the speed, at average speed the pictures move but the column didn't seem to move, at a faster rate everything moved and at a slower rate it looked like it was going backwards. There was also a game behind that where you had to shoot these little colored balls into the basket, and you could only throw one color it selected in, but the room itself kept changing colors so the balls would change colors too under the different lights so it was difficult, but I still managed to do better than Roy. There was a magnetic device with this magnetic liquid that would spike up when you activated the magnets. There was a back area with where you could make virtual ripple waves on the floor, test probability by rolling a ton of dice, make a design using a set amount of different shaped pieces, which we schooled the kids in, they said we were hayasugiru (too fast), and we played prime number air hockey, where the point was to reflect non-prime numbers to your opponent and they would split up, you received points equal to what prime numbers you let go into your zone, but if you let a non-prime number pass you lost all your points, and again I schooled Roy, a engineer major, in that. He did beat me though in the frequency game where you had to match up the pitches using a theromin (good job if you know what this is, else off to Wikipedia). At the end we got our pics taken by a machine and got to choose a background.

We went downstairs and I tried to take a picture, but they wouldn't let me, and it was a good shot of the main lobby with thew cool different color lights lining the floor. They had downstairs some free scientific experiments like rolling balls down different slopes, bouncing balls, and probability forming a normal curve through a plinko type device.

There was also a Lumix camera display, they showed their new HDTVs even letting you see the megapixels through a magnifier, they had a Blu-Ray section, and a Nintendo area.

We then went to the Edo-Tokyo Museum next and had to take a bunch of trains to get there. I was able to eat the bento lunch my host family had prepared for me that day on one of the trains, it was really good. The museum was right next to the Sumo arena, so I knew where it was. We got our tickets and went upstairs up a giant escalator. Int he main exhibit they had a lot on display and a lot of replicas and miatures. I'll let my pics do the talking for this.

You crossed a bridge to get into the museum.


This had to be the coolest thing there.


Difference between flash and no flash, cool


This guy looks important








I spy you















This was a great picture












Parade


Sad part is the bike part looked newer than most bikes I've seen here


I'm on top of you

All coins

Cranes


New something bugged me in here


Talk about your ancient technology...


Armor with a mustache and a kimono






Geisha


Old

Really Old


Now that's an old phone booth... pulls out my iPhone lol


There's a balloon in here !?


Toshiba you have come so far


Olympics merchandise old and new


One of the first color TVs in Japan, even says "color" on it


Bulls-eye


more fire power

Bo-bomb, never stood a chance




Last pic before the place closed

As you they had a lot of replica's, a whole could small building, replicas of the emperor parading, giant festival pieces, wood-block painting, and even more modern times, they even had nice little moving things attractions too.

They also had the balls in the cup, and was able to land it on the top peg a few times for the people there. (Yes, I learned how to do that here)


We left and I got a pic of the escalator and me in front of the Sumo building.

Saw this right before the escalator


Escalator, the Japanese guy thinks it's weird too



Sumo Building


Random pyramids behind glass


Flat escalator

He was going to see Star Trek, so he headed off to Shinjuku. I went with him because I was meeting some friends to hang out that night. I called Zach up and we met at the station. At the same time another person a bit on the creepy side came up to us and asked if I was there for the party. I thought someone in my group knew him, while Zach thought I was bringing him along, both of us didn't want him to go, and had a big laugh when we were both wrong. He was actually there for the Comic circle party that I wasn't told about, but oh well, I was hanging with my friends that night. The rest of my group showed up and we grabbed some drinks at the konbini and went to a great Hookah bar.

We saw this Karaoke building outside the konbini, it looked awesome.


Because of the rain, the streets were crowded with umbrellas

We got our own booth, and got a mango and rose hookah to start off with.





One of the friends we had with us met back up with us after vanishing and brought back a girl. We ordered another hookah, this time chocolate mint, and when we left they gave us each 1000 yen coupons because we brought with us a coupon paper, each worth another hookah, so we are defiantly going back. We grabbed some McDonalds and headed home.