Sunshine City

Good news, everyone! Cinnamon and I are, in fact, NOT dead! We did, however, feel that earthquake this morning. I woke up because my bed was shaking, and Cinnamon was whispering "Hey Persimmon, can you feel that?" I thought she was either kicking or shaking my bed, so I told her yes, I could feel it, and cut it out. When she told me it wasn't her, we just assumed it was an earthquake. It wasn't very strong where we are, though. Apart from the bed shaking and a few items on our desk, nothing major happened, so no need to fear! But now we can say we've been in an earthquake.

Early Tuesday morning, Cinnamon awoke to the peculiar feeling that something in the room was moving, Upon looking around, she discovered she was right! Somehow, this little guy had snuck in while we had our window open, so Cinnamon kindly helped him back outside. We've also seen a pretty big gecko on the window at night, but thankfully he stays outside.

But now back to our daily adventures. Wednesday, we headed out to Ikebukuro on the north side of Tokyo to hit up Sunshine City, a complex of several buildings full of shopping and restaurants and offices and a mini theme park called Namco Namja Town (which - you guessed it - was created by the video game design company Namco). But we were mostly in it for the shopping, of which there was plenty.

That's outside the second level of the main building. I think it's called the Alta building? And the building behind it, the World Import Mart building had some sort of Tokyo Fair thing going on, but it looked like a convention type of thing, so we didn't check it out.

Across from the sign and looking out toward the road is a big Animate building and a K-books. (Both of those stores sell manga, anime DVDs and CDs and related goods). Also, somewhere over to the left of the Animate is the Amlux Toyota Auto Salon, where you can check out all the newest Japanese Toyota models. ...But Cinnamon didn't want to go there, so we didn't. Also, I don't have any pictures of it, sorry.

So after snapping a few pictures outside here, we headed on up the stairs to the 3rd floor of the Sunshine City building to do some more shopping. There were a lot of clothing stores - some pretty pricey - a lot of cheap shoes, though sadly none for me, (would you believe my feet are size LL in Japan? That's how they size shoes - S, M, L, LL), and also quite a few hats. But we didn't find anything we liked, so we didn't get anything.

I don't know, this is some sort of park next to the building. It was also photographed from the same place all the other pictures were.

Next to this building there's what's called "Sunshine 60", a skyscraper with a bunch of offices in it, but on the top few floors there are restaurants and an observatory. We were going to check out the observatory, but it cost like 640 yen (about $6) and we're cheap, so we didn't go. Maybe some other time.

After our exhaustive shopping trip, we decided to take our chances with a sit down restaurant (as opposed to fast food), so we chose - that's right - the only Mexican place in the building! Hahaha, it was really good, though! I swear one day we'll get around to actually eating Japanese food.. But so much of it is... kinda weird. And they put fried eggs on everything. You find fried eggs on pasta, on pizza, on hamburgers, and on their "hamburg steaks" (which are pretty much like hamburgers without the bun, usually dressed up with some sort of sauce or onions and various other veggies and whatnot).

But we'll be back to Sunshine City at a later date, because I'm pretty sure I'll be spending my birthday at Namja Town. They have a "Desert Stadium", a "Gyoza Stadium" and an "Ice Cream Stadium", so we will definitely be stuffing our faces full of delicious goodies~

On our way back home that night, we finally got to see some of the bright lights of Tokyo! However, most of our trip was spent on the train, so we didn't see too much and I didn't get any pictures. Next time, though!
Thursday was rainy, so we didn't go out except to make a trip to the store for dinner.

Yesterday, we decided to go see where Cinnamon will have to meet for her race on Sunday, so we headed out to the middle of nowhere. Okay, so really it was just about 25 minutes outside of Tokyo in Shimomaruko. It definitely had a small town feel to it that Cinnamon said reminded her of Florida. But we went the wrong way and didn't find the place, and since it wasn't on the train station map, we decided to just head back.

So we stopped off at Den-en Chofu!

It had a very upscale feel to it, with lots of nice, big houses, but not much in the way of shopping.

But it did have this place - the Sanrio Strawberry House! The building was actually shaped like a big strawberry! So we went inside, but they didn't have as much stuff as the Sanrio shop in Ginza. I figured a giant strawberry could fit a lot more things in it, but I was sadly mistaken. Still made for an interesting experience.

After that, we did a little shopping in Meguro where Cinnamon bought a few t-shirts at the Uniqlo before we headed home for the evening.

Today, in a few hours we're going to Tennouzu Isle to see our very first *pnish* show and I am beyond excited. (*pnish* is a 4-man theatre group who is best known for their combination of acting, comedy and dance skills). This particular play is called Samurai Mode, and I don't know too much of what it's about, but I know there's swordfighting. It promises to be a fun evening~

The City of Gold and Cats

Hello again, everyone! Hope you've all been doing well~ Cinnamon and I are slowly adjusting to life here in Japan, but it's hard to get used to. Things are so different in Tokyo compared to small town St Augustine life. For one, there are a lot more trains. But that's okay, because riding the train is so far one of my favorite aspects of Japan. We ride the same one every day, since it goes to all the major stops. It's fast, it's easy, and you hardly ever have to wait more than a few minutes for one to pull up! Here comes one now -

That's the JR Yamanote train pulling into Yurakucho station. It took us back to Meguro yesterday after our excursion to Ginza. Ginza is where a lot of banks and financial buildings are located, but because it is also home to Sanrio's flagship store, we decided to pay it a visit anyway.

Of course, it took us about an hour of wandering aimlessly before we finally found the building it was in. And during that time, we met a businessman at a crosswalk who wanted to talk to us in English. He asked us where we were from and if we were enjoying Japan, He'd even been to Florida with his son - they went to Disney World. Eventually, we parted ways and he told us he hopes we enjoy our trip.

Finally, while looking for a bench on which to sit down and eat some snacks we had purchased at the 7-11, we passed a sign with Hello Kitty on it, so after taking a quick snack break, we went inside. And here are the pictures I have of what was outside of that building.

These buildings are in Nishi Ginza (nishi meaning west) and were at the intersection of some very busy streets. I don't know what most of those buildings are, but there's Olympus and Nikon's at the bottom of that Fujiya building. Here's another shot of it.

It's still hard to see Nikon, but it's there. Also, you can see a sign for Big Echo, which is a pretty big karaoke chain in Japan. I see them all over the place.

Across the street was this Sony building... and some sort of giant advertisement for wind power? I'm not exactly sure on that one.

Here, through the trees is the Nishi Ginza shopping center. It's located underneath an elevated freeway and it houses the Sanrio Gift Gate - a wonderful store filled with all kinds of Hello Kitty and related merchandise. Cinnamon and I both walked away with something from there, but luckily didn't spend too much. We'll probably be back, though.

Across from the shopping center in an alley next to a tiny little park, we found this guy here. I didn't realize when I took the picture, his tongue was out, haha. But since I know you guys don't care so much about stray cats in Tokyo, here's someone you do know! (And she'll probably kill me for posting this picture).

It's Cinnamon standing next to... some statue outside the Nishi Ginza shopping center. I don't know what the statue's there for. Probably historic or something.

Lastly, we have this little side street we walked down to get back to the station. Cinnamon said she liked it, so she made me take a picture of it. It was full of tiny little bars and small restaurants.

I haven't uploaded the pictures from today's trip to Ikebukuro Sunshine City, so those will have to wait until our next update, Definitely look forward to it~!

The Great Gain Hunt

Yesterday, Sunday, Cinnamon and I decided to take a trip to the grocery store to buy some food to make ourselves. The one we went to is about 7 or 8 minutes away and is called PoroRoca. It's not a very big store, but they have a pretty good selection of various foods. We ended up with some bananas (5 for about $1.80), yogurt, Ritz crackers (which were expensive), cream cheese (which was also expensive - about $4.80 for a box), pasta and sauce, mini pizzas and some other stuff.

Also, we bought some cup ramen and I just don't understand why it's so expensive! This is the country that created cup ramen! Why is it $1.50? Even a little 6 pack you have to cook on the stove is something like $3.00! I think it's very strange. And as I expected, fruit is very expensive. A single lemon will run you about $2.50 and a cantaloupe the size of a large grapefruit will set you back $7.

Anyway, moving on~ After we got back from the store and had lunch, we headed off for Shibuya. For some reason I always thought of Shibuya as more of a financial, business-type area, but it's full of trendy clothing stores and big name international stores like the Gap, Apple, Nike and Adidas!

Here we have Shibuya Crossing. It is considered to be the busiest pedestrian intersection in the world. Right in the center of the picture is Shibuya 109, a super trendy shopping center. The glass building you see on the very right side houses one of the world's busiest Starbucks. Unfortunately I didn't get a good picture of it from the corner we were standing on.

A little further down the street is a huge Tower Records. A lot of these buildings have big video screens showing ads for new movies, CDs, concerts and video games. Many also have audio and often you'll hear two or three different things playing at the same time right next to each other. Total auditory overload. Also, I'm slowly learning that Japan really loves Avril Lavigne. I hear her music in TV shows and commercials all the time. That Tower Records screen was advertising a concert of hers (coming in September!) when we passed by later.

This picture is overlooking a street running parallel to the one in the last picture. It was also taken from a pedestrian crosswalk.

This is just a shot of the left side of that same street. There are always lots of people walking in the city - no matter the time of day or day of the week.

Down a side street, we came upon this place. Don't know what it is, but it had some interesting signs, so I snapped a picture.

But what we had really come to Shibuya for was to seek out this store here - Gain (the green and white sign in the middle, if you can't see it right away). I had to figure out where it was so I could come back today (which I did) to buy a $135 jacket (which I also did). But the jacket is not for me, so don't worry! Yamashita-tenchou, the guy who runs the store, is very nice, though I didn't get to talk with him much. I also didn't get to see any quasi-celebrities, which I was almost hoping for, if only to have a story to tell about it. Ah well, maybe next time.

And lastly, across from Gain was this interesting graffiti that Cinnamon made me take a picture of. It's... kinda creepy, haha!

Today we spent mostly wandering around Shibuya again and we went to KFC (the 500th store!) for lunch. ...The Colonel would not be proud. Seriously, the chicken was batter-dipped! We all know the Colonel's secret recipe is breaded chicken. Breaded. It was still pretty good, though.

But it started raining while we were walking around Harajuku, so we walked up to Yoyogi Station and just headed home.

I almost forgot! Here's a picture of a street address sign down the street from where we're saying. (You pronounce that word "cho-may", so you know).

And this is looking left down the street in front of where we're staying. It's in a pretty quiet residential area with a n elementary school nearby. The houses all seem to have paper thin walls, because we can occasionally hear our neighbor's toddler having a tantrum. Also, there are lots of crows. Everywhere. And they are loud. But they must all be up high, because while I can hear them, I very rarely see them.

Cinnamon is napping now, so it'll likely be another quiet night for us. One day we'll get to see the neon lights of Tokyo at night. For now, we're still trying our best to get adjusted to things here. And hopefully you all are enjoying vicariously experiencing Japanese culture! Look forward to more interesting things in the near future~

Tokyo is full of hills

So here we are at 3pm on Monday, sitting around our house not doing much. Why? Well we just got back home after being out and about for 6 hours - most of that walking. But the good news is we have pictures this time!
Friday, we went out and decided to explore some of the city, starting with figuring out how long it takes to walk to Meguro Station (around 25 minutes). Meguro Station is on the JR Yamanote Line, which is the main JR line that goes in a loop around Tokyo, hitting all the major metropolitan areas. So basically it's the easiest way to get to most anywhere.
Well, we decided to explore the Meguro area and kept on walking... and walking... and walking until we got to Shibuya (about 2 miles away). Unfortunately, we took a wrong turn and completely bypassed the entire main shopping section and wandered around in what I guess is just the business district for what seemed like forever. Eventually, about a mile and a half later, we came upon Yoyogi Park, so we wandered through there.

We ended up in Harajuku where we proceeded to trek through Omotesando and Omotesando Hills (a very upscale shopping center), then through Minami-Aoyama (minami means south) before we finally got on a train to head back home.

These pictures were taken from a pedestrian crossover on... some street I don't know the name of. (Seriously, I'd say 75% of the streets in Tokyo do not have names. Makes it really hard to figure out where you are.)

This one is looking to our right.

And this is to our left. Also on the left and just off the very right side of this picture is a Japanese Subway sandwich shop. Only because it's Japanese, it's more than just sandwiches! It's a Subway Sandwich & Cafe. We didn't go in, but it looked like it had a juice bar and everything!

Needless to say, by the end of the day we were very hot and sweaty and tired from our 6 hour trek in the Tokyo sun. My poor feet did not take kindly to the hills - or my shoes- so they had blisters and were generally very unhappy. So we just took it easy on Saturday, only going out for dinner... where we had McDonald's. I had a bacon lettuce burger and Cinnamon had a chicken sandwich. Both came with lots of mayo, because the Japanese seem to really love the condiment for some reason. Also, compared to the US, the portions are quite a bit smaller. What the Japanese consider medium is what we would consider small. The price was about the same, though.
That sums up our first two full days here. I'll add the next two in another post so this one doesn't get too long. ^_^

We have arrived

Just so no one worries too much, I wanted to make a quick post to let you all know we arriived in Tokyo safely. It was the longest, most un-leg-roomiest flight of my life, but it was a very smooth ride with little turbulence and TONS of food!
On the plane we had a snack, then a meal of breaded chicken, rice, vegetables, tamagoyaki (sort of a sweet omelet), cold noodles with sauce, some sort of salad, a roll and a little mini Haagen Dasz. Very filling! That was about 2 hours into the flight. Then, about 5 hours later (after I had just told Cinnamon I totally wasn't hungry), we got a sandwich (half turkey and half tuna) and not half an hour later, ANOTHER meal of seafood pasta, vegetables and fruit. Those Japanese sure do know how to keep a girl from going hungry!

Anyway, to keep this from getting too long, it was rainy in Japan when we got here, we've ridden 3 different trains (which I think are totally awesome), gotten lost twice (but not too terribly), relied on the kindness of a few English-speaking strangers and carried 30lbs of carry on luggage all around Tokyo.

But finally, we made it to the house where we're staying! Let me just say our flight got into Tokyo at 1:30pm and we finally made it to our house around 6:30. It was a very long day, so we pretty much crashed immediately. And now it's 9:15am and I'm surprisingly well rested (I know, I know - Persimmon up before noon?!) if incredibly sore, and we'll probably be going out for food and whatnot as soon as our luggage gets delivered.

Sorry there aren't any pictures yet. With all the heavy bags we had yesterday, plus the rain, picture taking was kind of inconvenient. But we'll get to that soon! Hope you all are doing well without us~

Random culture tidbits

Since Brad asked me for culture and etiquette stuff, I'll be talking about that in this post. (Don't worry - there are only 34 days left until my trip, so I'll actually get to the really fun stuff and pictures before long!) Let's see... where to start?

I assume most people are familiar with the fact that Japanese people tend to be very polite. And they bow instead of shaking hands. That's pretty basic stuff. But there are a lot of little things they do - and don't do - that are pretty interesting. For example, when eating, you shouldn't stand your chopsticks up in a bowl of rice, because that's traditionally a custom done at funerals. Big no-no. You also shouldn't point or gesture with your chopsticks, pass food from your own chopsticks to someone else's, pick up food from a communal dish/bowl or scoop food directly from a bowl into your mouth. ...There's a lot of chopstick etiquette.

 The Japanese are also big on changing shoes when entering certain buildings or rooms. For instance, if you're entering a room with a tatami (woven mat made of bamboo) floor, you must take off your shoes. When entering a house, you should take off your shoes (and there's generally a little foyer area with a shoe rack specifically for this purpose). When you enter a bathroom, you put on a pair of bathroom slippers so you don't track germs and whatnot out of the bathroom on your feet.

I hear a lot of public restrooms don't have paper towels, and some lack toilet paper, so most people buy a handkerchief to use to dry their hands. As for toilet paper, there are commonly people who stand in front of shops handing out packets of tissues to advertise their businesses, and people seem to use these tissues in the restroom. Good to know. Also, the Japanese have both old fashioned and extremely new, high tech toilets, and Wikipedia has an interesting article on both, if you wanna read more on that.

As far as trains go, Japan has one of the best train systems in the world. They're very safe, very reliable and very, very punctual. Typically, trains stop for only a minute or two and if you aren't on or off within that minute, you're out of luck. It definitely pays to be punctual. Luckily, train passengers are generally very accommodating if you're trying to board or exit a train, even if there may be a ton of people on it, as is typically the case during rush hour.

Also, some of Japan's busiest train stations (and Shinjuku - the world's busiest, with an estimated 3.52 million passengers passing through EACH DAY, as of 2006) are pretty big and not only house the ticket machines and different terminals, but also shopping centers and restaurants several stories high! Plus, at the Marunouchi exit of Tokyo station, they're testing out a new type of flooring that generates power (to man the ticket gates) when stepped on, so that's pretty nifty.

Of course, riding on a train doesn't come without its own taboos. Talking on a cell phone on the train is prohibited, but text messaging and email is fine. Eating on a train (with the exception of the long distance shinkansen and express trains) is frowned on, as is eating while walking, oddly enough.

Trash is another thing that Japan does differently than the US. There are separate receptacles for PET bottles, glass, newspapers, burnable trash and non-burnable trash. And from what I hear, there are very few trash cans in public areas. People are generally expected to take whatever trash they have home with them to throw away.

However, Japan has a ton of vending machines. And they dispense everything from hot and cold beverages to foods, beer, clothing, fresh flowers, books, videos and CDs and even pornography. Here are two pictures of some regular, old beverage vending machines, as taken by my friend, Alison, when she visited Tokyo in November 2006:

Vending1

The blue and red bars beneath the drinks represent which beverages are hot and which are cold. (And go ahead and click on them if you want a closer look at all the different drinks they have to choose from~)

Vending2

I hope you enjoyed those pictures, because you're probably going to be seeing all kinds of random pictures like that from me when Cinnamon and I are finally over there. Right now, I'm all cultured out for one night. If I think of anything else, I'll try to remember to mention it next time. ^_^

Study Break

今晩は！　皆さん元気ですか？　今アイスクリームを食べて、日本語を勉強します。　3級漢字を勉強します。　ちょっと難しいです、でも頑張ります！

Having trouble reading that? Don't have Japanese text support on your computer? Well allow me to translate:
Konbanwa! Minna-san genki desu ka? Ima aisu kuriimu wo tabete, nihongo wo benkyou shimasu. San kyuu kanji wo benkyou shimasu. Chotto muzukashii desu, demo ganbarimasu!

Does that make it any easier? No? Okay, how about this:

Good evening! How is everyone? Right now, I'm eating ice cream and studying Japanese. I'm studying 3-kyuu kanji. It's somewhat difficult, but I'll do my best!

Now let me explain a little about what I'm studying here. First off, I'll start with explaining kanji. Kanji are the characters the Japanese language borrowed from the Chinese. They're easily identified because they are the most complicated-looking of Japan's 3 alphabets. Kanji are used to make up... most words in their language and roughly 2000 of them are used in your basic Japanese newspaper.

There are two other alphabets the Japanese use: hiragana - the curvy, rounder characters that mainly make up grammatical words/particles, and katakana/kana - the boxy, but simplistic characters mainly used for writing words borrowed from other languages (like "ice cream"). Of these two alphabets, there are about 46 characters each and they are the easiest to learn.

If the text I wrote up top looks like a bunch of squares to you, here's a picture to illustrate what I'm talking about:

(That sentence says "I drink coffee," by the way. I don't actually drink coffee, but that's beside the point.)

Okay, now that you know what kanji are, let me explain what "3-kyuu" means.

For the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (henceforth known as the JLPT), there are 4 levels, with 4 being the lowest or easiest and 1 being the most difficult, considered incredibly difficult for all but the most fluent speakers. Each level of the JLPT has a set of kanji that it tests you on (amongst other things like listening, reading and grammar). Here's (roughly) the breakdown:

• JLPT 4: 103 kanji
• JLPT 3: 284 kanji
• JLPT 2: 1023 kanji
• JLPT 1: 1926 kanji

I'm currently trying my luck with the 3-kyuu (or level 3) kanji. There are some I know, some I can recognize but can't remember the meaning of, and some I don't even think I've seen before. It's a good challenge~

Now that you're probably completely bored, I guess I'll update you on how the trip planning is coming along.

Well today I helped Cinnamon register for a race. ...I think. It was pretty tricky, since the whole page was in Japanese, but I'm pretty sure we got it, haha! I believe it's the 48th annual Tamagawa River "health marathon" commemorating the opening of the "Gasu" bridge. It's an 8k and is taking place June 15th at 10am. She'll probably drag me out of bed to go watch her run and take pictures, but she gets a t-shirt for it and that's really all she wanted. So wish her luck!

Other than that, I do believe maybe tomorrow I'll - or rather we'll - finally purchase our JR passes, since the dollar's up a bit against the yen (currently at 103). There's not much else left to do aside from book some hostels and rent a phone. And thank god, because we've only got 45 days left to go! Woo~