Very long picture post.

This is a compilation of photos from the past month or so. Hahaha. I forget to update this thing with new pictures but my parents want to see and they don't have facebook! Some of these pictures, I posted on facebook, but I uploaded these straight from my computer without looking at what I have on faceook. So keep an eye out!

Pretty lights at the Roppongi Station! That station is just a lot of fun. :D

A shop at the shopping mall at Roppongi. Was that Roppongi Hills? Or is Roppongi Hills where the Mori Tower is? I forget. "/ But yeah, this shop sold chopsticks. Mostly chopsticks. Beautiful, fun chopsticks. :D And this is their display window! I tried to get some close ups of the dolls that were on display but it was kinda hard.

Switching gears, this is the thunder gate at Asakusa.

Me, wafting smoke over my head in hopes of getting smarter. :D

I got a half fortune. It told me to never get married or to get a new job. To thank the fortune, I tied it to the bar and abandoned it. :D Bye bye.

Switching gears again, this was at the Tsukiji fish market! Look at the size of that tuna!

And so I had this for breakfast. From left to right, that's fatty tuna, tuna with avocado, and horse meat. Yes, horse meat.

After that Tsukiji excursion, we hit up Ginza. There were a bunch of these Hello Kitty bouquets! But they were expensive. And I can't take it back to the States.

And we found that the Imperial Palace was close to Ginza. So we walked over there and got a peak at it. The palace is that little bit of building peaking out from behind the bridge.

The Imperial Garden was beeeeautiful. I would've stayed longer but we were sleepy, tired, and hungry, thus making us cranky. D:

More garden!

And more.

We went to Roppongi again. This is near Tokyo Midtown. There was an odd sculpture. So Becky and I decided to take a picture with it. I think of weird poses, don't ask me?

The Mori Tower in Roppongi. All 54 stories of it!

Here's the Tokyo Tower! I wanted to buy Grace a keychain from there but it looks like the Eiffel Tower, so no fun.

Ferris wheel at Odaiba. It changes colors! It was beautiful. :) (We're planning an Odaiba excursion for this Saturday.)

Ah, what typically comes to mind when you think of Tokyo. :) It seems all romantic and stuff but man, don't base your judgments of Japan off of these pictures. I'm just not taking pictures of the mundane. But will soon.

The Rainbow Bridge!

So yes, I went to the Kabuki-za. This is to prove that I was there. And Bernadette's head is to the left. Haha, hello.

The Kabuki-za! I love this place!

A group picture of us. I'm standing next to two of my professors. It was very strange. Hahaha.

I've been seeing this pollack roe (명란젓? Is that how you spell it, 엄마? In Japanese, it's tarako.) crackers and it weirded me out a lot. But I bought it and tried it. And liked it.

Another strange cracker. Ddukbokee! I didn't dig it too much. I got it at Shin-Okubo (aka Korea Town) in some Korean market. Bleh.

And look at what I got in the mail from a certain someone in Santiago, Chile! :D This was taken on the bus. Hahahaha.

Look at my ecstatic joy.

And the goodies! Orly? Yarly. (Thank you, Grace!)

We had to go to the Ghibli Museum. Like, it's mandatory for my core class. The Ghibli Studio is where Miyazaki Hayao does his magic and it's located in Mitaka-shi, where my school is!

We arrived! This is me venturing into the magical forest through the mythical gates. (This isn't the end of the strange poses.)

I can't jump too high, I soon found out...

The museum is three stories tall. It's an absolutely delightful little place. If you're a Miyazaki fan and you're in Japan, you must come here! This is the spiral staircase that leads up to the garden on the roof! There's also a statue of a giant (from one of Miyazaki's films that I'm unfamiliar with.).

Hello, giant. I wasn't sure if he were friendly or not so I figured that I'm better safe than sorry. Hahaha. (I'm totally posing for this picture.)

Well, that's the end of it! I'll probably only upload a couple of the Ghibli pictures on facebook since it's not all too exciting or Tokyo-esque.

That's all for now. This picture post took such a long time. And I lost three games of chess against the computer while waiting for the pictures to upload. Hahaha. Good night!

This is the 100th post on this blog.

Woot. I'm the hundredth post. :D!

Anyway, I was finally able to meet up with John Yang. He came to TMEFC. Then we grabbed lunch and headed to Akihabara.

For those of you who don't know, Akihabara is also known as Electric Town. It has a lot of the latest gadgets and what not and you can usually find it for cheaper in Akihabara. It is also known for its anime nerdness. Which is what attracted me to the first place. (Yes, like a moth to light... -_-;)

I was a bit disappointed in not seeing as much nerdness (yes, nerdness and not nerdiness. I just like how "nerdness" sounds) as I had expected... or seen in Densha Otoko... but there was still a good amount of anime nerd going on.

We got a map of the area and John asked where the famous spots were, since we were foreign exchange students. The girl (dressed in a maid outfit) pointed us to three famous maid cafes and a couple of other places but we hit up the maid cafe first.

Wooooow.

They greet you by saying, "Okaerinasaimase, goshujinsama/ojousama." That translates into, "Welcome home, master/milady." Yeeeeeeah. It was kind of weird but we (ok, not we... just me... but I noticed that John speaks colloquially to everyone?) spoke to them formally so that put some kind of customer/service person distance between us. Aside from me, there were two other females in the cafe. The rest were guys. And kind of creepy guys, too. The guy was standing in front of us in line knew all of the maids and they all knew him too.

All in all, it was an interesting experience but everything was butt expensive. Just the sitting fee was 700 yen. My melon soda + scoop of ice cream costed 600 yen. @_@ Definitely an experience, but one that I'm not willing to experience again. Hahaha. It was really funny, the maids do this thing when they serve you your food/drink. They say, "We're going to do some magic to make it taste better." Then you're supposed to follow what they're doing; they make a heart shape with their hands, move it side to side saying, "Moe, moe, kyuu, moe, moe, kyuu" and then shake their hands on top of the food/drink and say, "Oishiku nare!" ... Yeeeah. (Moe = mmm... hard to describe, wiki it. Kyuu = just a sound/noise. Oishiku nare = "Become delicious!")

Hahaha. Oh yeah, then after that, we walked around and we grabbed dinner since we didn't want to eat in that butt expensive place where the food was probably mediocre at best. Then we played this taiko drum game that I'm really really bad at but it was a lot of fun. Especially playing it to the Lucky Star opening song. Motteke! Seira Fuku! Ahahahaha.

Mmmmkay. I'm going to stop my nerdy post here. But after going to Akihabara today, I realize that I am not worthy to be called an anime nerd. There is still too much that I don't know/haven't watched/haven't read, so please don't call me it. But I do like anime. :D

Good night! Hhahahaa. (I'll post the only two pictures that I have from Akihabara in my next picture post!)

BTW! I SAW A GIRL DRESSED AS HARUHI SUZUMIYA. IT WAS SO TRIPPY. But she worked at the Taito arcade. When I asked for a picture, she said, "Ok, that's fine," as if she's asked it many, many times. Hahhaa.

Ok, forrealz. Peeeeace.

I feel like trash.

I think that I have food poisoning. Though all the food poisoning cases I've seen have lasted for a week. o_o But when I google'd my symptoms, all the hits that I got back were food poisoning so I'm going to guess that that's what I have.

Btw, the symptoms have been diarrhea and fever. I will not elaborate anymore than that. Hahaha.

I'm not sure where I got the food poisoning from (as I'm assuming that that's what I have). I ate at a sushi-go-round last night in Shibuya (which I will have pictures of) but no one else that I ate with got messed up. Haha. I denno. But that's ok, I think that the brunt of it's over. I got so much sleep today. I had to skip church too, 'cause my fever was running too high and I didn't know when diarrhea would hit me again. The safest place was my room.

I made some rice porridge and am slowly eating it right now. Good thing, my body's not having an adverse reaction to it.

Anyway, enough with my whining. Here are pictures!

Kirin Lemon! My favorite soda in Japan thus far. It's a lemon soda, if you haven't figured that part out already.

For all you curious about how it looks like inside the train. This was pretty late at night so there weren't too many people on the train. I believe that this was the Chuo Line.


I had soondubu! It was tiny, though. My hand's there for a size comparison. Hahaha. Just look at how the spoon juts out of the bowl. It was tiny. But it was filling.

Don't believe that my school's surrounded by a forest? Take a look at this! It looks like you could just pitch a tent right there!

But the trees to make the campus look pretty. :) This is the entrance into the school.

Where people eat lunch. We have a lunch period! It seriously feels like high school. Hahaha.

So, where do you suppose this is?

Sweets Forest! Yep, the trees are indoors.They're obviously fake but they're so pretty. *-* This was in the outskirts of Shibuya, I think? It's such a couples place. x_X But yes, Sweets Forest is a whole bunch of dessert stores. Think of a mini dessert mall. Mmm...

On the other side, they even had a whole autumn theme going on!

There's this cute little well in the... forest.

I got a crepe. It was preeetty good. But very expensive. D: The coolest thing, though, was the utensils! They're made of wood! Hhaaha. Eco-friendly utensils. :D The downside is that you could taste the wood when you ate your food. That was a little weird.

Hahahah this one cracked me up so much. Emo Cafe! I bought something here, just because of the name of the store. Hhahahaa.

Yes, they also sold Emo Blownies. Mmmm. Blownies...

I got this little orange chocolate... blob. It tasted pretty good but I was expecting more. Oh well.

Shibuya! This is what I saw as soon as I got out of the train station. Craziness!

Took a picture with Hachikou. So Hachikou was a real dog. Its owner got him when he was a puppy back in like, the 1920s or something. Hachikou would walk with his owner to the Shibuya station every day and then walk back home afterwards. When it was time for the owner to come back home, Hachikou would go wait at the station for its master. The crazy thing is, after the owner died, Hachikou stilled waited on its master every day at the station for 20-some years. He became a minor national celebrity and they raised this statue to remember his loyalty. He was there for the raising of his own statue. Haha. But yes, that story made me go ;o;!

Yes, I am walking the famous scramble crossing! We wanted to go up on a higher level to get a picture of it but alas, we couldn't find a place to do it. D: Whatevs.

A glimpse of a crazy Shibuya street.

Ah, this is at the sushi-go-round. We have to eat a minimum of 7 plates. The plates are 120 yen each. It's not too bad. This was probably my favorite there, aside from the tuna. Yes, it's just beef & onions. I can't get away from beef. *-*

Gochisosama deshita. Haha. I took pictures of all of my dishes (except one, I got too excited and ate before I remembered to take the picture... -_-;). This is the end result.

Oh, and I threw a melon on there last minute, just to kind of leave a refreshing taste in my mouth.

Yes, the famous Shibuya 109. Eight floors of shops! Crazy shops!

I was diggin' the fur. Apparently, fur's the "in" thing right now.

Some crazy 80's wear store.Yes, the girls you see are workers. A couple of my friends had more guts to ask them for a picture. Hahhaah.

A square watermelon! And yes, it is ~$120!

And a pyramid shaped watermelon. This one costs ~$150, I believe.

Oh, and just to prove that I was there. Yeeeeeah.

Some crazy, big screen. o_o There are three of them overlooking the scramble crossing.

The monstrous screen on the Q-Front building. And yes, that is a Starbucks Coffee that you see at the bottom of the picture. I had a matcha frappaccino there.

Ok! This picture post took me nearly an hour and a half to do. Hahahaha. Time to do more important things. Good bye!