Yokohama

6/8/08

My host dad is home for the weekend. Tonight we ate sukiyaki. It really is a lot of fun to cover the table in newspaper and just start cooking right then and there. I drank some sake with him. I actually like the cheap stuff (it came from a carton, I'm assuming it was cheap) better than the good stuff that I got to try yesterday.

Speaking of yesterday, it was the really fun day of the weekend. I went on one of the school trips to Yokohama. Everyone met up at this swanky mall type place at which out first stop was a Pokemon store. Everything was Pokemon-even the registers were shaped like Pokeballs. This was the start of what quickly became the theme for the day: cute. All around us everywhere we went were adorable babies and if there weren't babies there were small dogs wearing clothes. I can't fathom why someone would think their dog would want to wear suspenders and a skirt.


After the childhood flashback that was the Pokemon store Ryan and I had some delicious gelatto and got stared at by a baby (probably her first time seeing white people) and went up Landmark Tower-the tallest (I think) building in Japan. It was a little foggy so we couldn't see Mt. Fuji but the view was still amazing, though you had to stay in the building.



From there the whole group took a ferry ride that eventually landed us in Chinatown. The streets were lined with vendor selling food, fortune telling, and many other oddities. Ryan and I went off and ate in a little hole-in-the-wall place and our peanut chicken, fried rice, and jasmine tea was really delicious. Here another baby kept playing peek-a-boo with us. We were still a little hungry so we bought some momo-pan from a street vendor. It was a bun stuffed with peach flavored filling and the outside was decorated to look like a peach-delicious! After that we went into some touristy type stores and tried on all the Chinese looking clothes and I bought a panda charm for my cell phone. Next the whole group went to this area called the Bluff and to a park near there. It was pretty but the view from the Bluff wasn't what I was hoping considering buildings between the lookout and the water.



















The last part of the day was optional. But myself and several friends decided to do it. We went to the Zaim Cafe for a school Digital Youth event. We had some time to blow before anything started so before that we hung out near the major league baseball field. The fans were really loud. Now Ryan and I really want to go to a game. When we went back to the cafe there were various things going on, including sake tasting (woohoo the legal drinking age in Japan is 20!), a shamisen (a type of stringed guitar) player, a really trippy fashion show, and a rock band. The verdicts= sake: so-so, shamisen: really cool-I would listen to that now, fashion show: I hope they were trying to make a statement because the clothes were more costumes than anything, but it was still pretty cool, rock band: good enough but you couldn't hear the singer. There was some other stuff on the venue but I had to leave since I was about 2 hours away from Chiba and I didn't want to miss the last train home.

I'm going to try to figure this picture thing out. Though I won't be able to put them all up here considering I took about 150 for the Yokohama trip only.