The past week has been crazy! Albert came on Wednesday night, so I showed him around Okayama. Unfortunately, the castle and the garden were already closed, so we just went shopping and had curry for dinner. The next two days, he went to Kyoto while I was at work. He was going to go to Kyoto and Himeji on one day and Hiroshima the next, but Kyoto was just too good that he had to go back. At night, we went for conveyor-belt sushi (we put away 20 plates between the two of us, we showed some restraint!) and Yoshinoya. I took Albert to the grocery store one night to show him the general cost of groceries. He agrees that the cows must be golden here. :)
Saturday morning we got up REEEAL early and took a Hikari Shinkansen to Tokyo. My first Shinkansen experience was pretty neat. The thing goes faster than I've ever experienced on Via, that's for sure. Tokyo was AMAZING. The first day, we went to Tokyo Dome and hit up the amusement park there. I'm not entirely sure how I got convinced to go on the roller coaster, but screams of terror were coming from me...not only that, but after the ride had ended, my legs were shaking uncontrollably. Perhaps even more than that time I started speaking in tongues! We decided, "what the heck!" and bought tickets to see a Tokyo Giants game that night. I must say, baseball in North America sucks. I'd rather see my dentist than suffer through an MLB game. That baseball game we saw was awesome!! The fans are like European soccer fans, and they're really hyped about it all. I'm surprised there were no "baseball hooligans." We didn't manage to get a hotel, so we just went back to Toshio's the spend the night.
We got up bright and early the next morning and went back to Tokyo. This time, we started in Akihabara, the famed electronics district. I bought 2 electronic dictionaries (one for a friend), a 1Gb USB stick, and some other goodies. My new dictionary is awesome: it is trilingual (English, Japanese, Chinese) and has a stylus so I can input Chinese or Kanji characters and have it spit out the meaning for me. Then we trekked over to Harajuku, the fashion area. The fashion is...different... but I just had to go, I mean, if Gwen Stefani has a song about it, it must be good. Then we strolled around to the Imperial Palace, but you can't really see much from the wrong side of the river...I mean "moat."
That was pretty much it for my time in Tokyo. It was getting late, and for safety reasons, I didn't want to get back to Okayama too late. So I took the Nozomi Shinkansen (the fastest class of the bullet trains). It was INCREDIBLE. It went SO fast that I wasn't even sure what we were passing were stations because all I saw were BLURS. Via definitely needs to step it up a few notches.
So of course this doesn't sound like a cheap weekend, but when else are 3 high school friends going to find themselves in the same corner of the world like that? Never. Can't put a price tag on it.
Saturday morning we got up REEEAL early and took a Hikari Shinkansen to Tokyo. My first Shinkansen experience was pretty neat. The thing goes faster than I've ever experienced on Via, that's for sure. Tokyo was AMAZING. The first day, we went to Tokyo Dome and hit up the amusement park there. I'm not entirely sure how I got convinced to go on the roller coaster, but screams of terror were coming from me...not only that, but after the ride had ended, my legs were shaking uncontrollably. Perhaps even more than that time I started speaking in tongues! We decided, "what the heck!" and bought tickets to see a Tokyo Giants game that night. I must say, baseball in North America sucks. I'd rather see my dentist than suffer through an MLB game. That baseball game we saw was awesome!! The fans are like European soccer fans, and they're really hyped about it all. I'm surprised there were no "baseball hooligans." We didn't manage to get a hotel, so we just went back to Toshio's the spend the night.
We got up bright and early the next morning and went back to Tokyo. This time, we started in Akihabara, the famed electronics district. I bought 2 electronic dictionaries (one for a friend), a 1Gb USB stick, and some other goodies. My new dictionary is awesome: it is trilingual (English, Japanese, Chinese) and has a stylus so I can input Chinese or Kanji characters and have it spit out the meaning for me. Then we trekked over to Harajuku, the fashion area. The fashion is...different... but I just had to go, I mean, if Gwen Stefani has a song about it, it must be good. Then we strolled around to the Imperial Palace, but you can't really see much from the wrong side of the river...I mean "moat."
That was pretty much it for my time in Tokyo. It was getting late, and for safety reasons, I didn't want to get back to Okayama too late. So I took the Nozomi Shinkansen (the fastest class of the bullet trains). It was INCREDIBLE. It went SO fast that I wasn't even sure what we were passing were stations because all I saw were BLURS. Via definitely needs to step it up a few notches.
So of course this doesn't sound like a cheap weekend, but when else are 3 high school friends going to find themselves in the same corner of the world like that? Never. Can't put a price tag on it.
