Judi and I slept in a bit on Tuesday, finally checking out of our capsule inn around 9:30am and heading over to Starbucks and the local combene (convenient store) to get some breakfast. I wrote some postcards and we just kinda enjoyed sitting for a bit before we went up to Uniqlo to check out some clothes (this is one of the 2 stores in all of Japan that actually have clothes in my size!!!! it's like a casual GAP). I ended up buying almost $70 worth of turtlenecks, leggings (yes leggings, like from the 80's!), and a sweater and we headed over to Yokohama.
Yokohama is home to the biggest Chinatown in the world (besides China of course). It was weird to be in Japan but have everything around me be Chinese, except when the employees talked to you they still spoke to you in Japanese even though I was half expecting something in Chinese. It made me realize how much more I know about China than even Japan, and wondered again why I had picked Japan of all countries to live in when I knew absolutely close to zero about it before I came.
So Judi and I, both having a liking for Chinese things (including boys) enjoyed some delicious and much sought after boba, those little sesame seed balls I love so much at dimsum (yay!!!) and even bought a huge steamed pork bun. I also went to the Chinese museum where I walked through the "Panda World" museum (don't go there, it's not worth the 500yen to walk around and look at pictures of pandas with Japanese captions for the 5 minutes it takes you to go in a circle). I bought some souvenirs (Japan is all about the keychains! Never any postcards, just keychains and pens and more keychains, and tins of cookies...). I was able to find another shotglass, this one with pandas that reminded me of David.
Judi and I headed out of Chinatown and over to the coastal area, which reminded me a lot of San Diego or Santa Barbara. There was even a little amusement park by the water called Cosmo World, and we took a subway over just in time to catch the sun setting over the horizon. It was actually clear and orange enough that we got to see Mt. Fuji in the distance past the tall buildings, so I took about a million pictures of that. It was weird to think that I was at the top of that crazy mountain. What was I thinking!?!
Judi and I were on a major haul after that trying to get to Akihabara and then to Mito at a decent time. I had told David I'd be in Tokyo this weekend so I could stop by Akihabara (the big electronic district of Tokyo) to buy him some of his transformers. It wasn't too hard to find the alley he was talking about, and as Judi went to Yodobashi camera to buy a new lens cap, I walked through all 6 floors of the building asking if anyone had the transformers he wanted. What was great was David was actually at his computer at the same time so I would take pictures with my cell phone and email him at the same time, figuring out what he wanted and how much was too much...it was pretty crazy. About 5 minutes in my brain was thumping and it was getting nuty in there, I don't understand how so much plastic and boxes can be so important to so many men in business suits.
Anyway, it was a quick run through, I could only find 1 of the list he had sent me, so in that hour I bought that for him and we ran back to Ueno station to get our tickets back to Mito. We made our train perfectly on time and I slept most of the way back to Mito.
We arrived at 9:10pm and promptly caught our bus home at 9:20pm, me with my backpack, purse, bag of clothes, and another bag of transformers. Judi had a massive bag of Disneyland stuff, clothes, souvenirs, her big camera bag, and her backpack...we looked insane and I'm sure everyone thought we were tourists fresh off the airplane. As soon as I arrived in Mito I also realized how much colder it is here than it was in Tokyo, at least by 5 degrees, which sucks. And I started sneezing incessantly and my runny nose started again, but had been clear all this weekend. So i'm pretty sure I'm allergic to something over here (maybe Mito!) I'll have to check that out this weekend cuz it hasn't really stopped; I've gone through 2 boxes of tissue in the last week!
Got home before 10pm, unpacked, read some more HP#3 (almost done), and passed out around midnight, definitely not looking forward to a full day at school tomorrow. =P
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