Tokyo Days, part 1

Sorry that I haven't been keeping this thing up to date for Tokyo, but (ironically) I wasn't around an internet connection that I could use for more than 5 mins. So, let me preface this by saying that it's cold. Very cold. Anyway, here goes...

Day 1 (pictures)
On the first day (of Christmas ♪♪, har har, just kidding), after getting into Narita at around 4:30 or 5, I met up with my Japanese friend Atsuko. We went went to have dinner at this yakiniku place called Toraji in Shinjuku (it's a chain of restaurants). It was EXCELLENT. Seriously, some of the best yakiniku that I've ever eaten. My mouth is watering just thinking about it. Anyway, after that, we went to grab some cake and coffee, then I went to the house of my other friend, Yousuke, cuz that's where I was staying.

Day 2 (pictures)
The next day, I woke up to go have lunch with another friend, Shiho, but she had to move it to another day because of work, so I just went around a bit, exchanged money, got my JR pass, that kind of stuff. I then went to grab a late lunch with Atsuko. We meandered around Shinjuku, mostly underground and in buildings cuz it was pouring rain.

After that, we went to Odaiba. A very cool place. If you haven't heard of it, it's got a giant Ferris Wheel and a theme park and the very cool FujiTV building. I didn't want to spend too much money and it was raining, so we didn't ride the Ferris Wheel or anything like that. Instead, we went into the FujiTV building. It had a gift shop. Also, if you haven't seen it (I'll post pics), it's got a huge gold ball at the highest part of the building. I didn't know that you could go into that. Well, you can; it's an observation deck. It's a pretty awesome view. After hanging around in there for a bit, we went to a lower floor which had all these mini-sets for TV shows that are filmed in the FujiTV studios. After that we had some sweet sake (which is a seasonal drink, I think), and had dinner at a Hawaiian Hamburger restaurant in the area, then we went back.

Day 3 (pictures)
I met up again with Atsuko and this time we met her friend, Sayaka. Actually, I had met Sayaka before because the two of them came to visit me in Cali back when I was at Stanford. It was cool seeing her again. Anyway, we went to this park named Rikugien. It's actually got some cultural significance, but I don't remember what exactly (hah), but it was a really beautiful park. After that we went to Akihabara to do some shopping.

Oh, before I continue, I should say that I've been looking to buy a DS Lite or a PSP for a little while (since my friend Tim came back from his vacation with a DS Lite, that is), and while the PSP was readily available (and cheaper than in the US) and it has some pretty good games, Tim has a DS with an awesome game that I wanted to play and that I wanted to play against him in, so I decided to get the DS, the only problem being that the DS is sold out EVERYWHERE. To solve this, Atsuko talked to her friend who works at Nintendo and one is on order now (w00t!) Anyway, while at Akiba, I picked up some DS games, including the cool fighting one that Tim has and a couple of ones used to study/improve Japanese, and some accessories. I got it all Duty Free, so that was nice. Also, it was really windy that day.

The last thing that happened that day is that I went to a mini-party for participants in SJEC (Stanford Japan Exchange Club). Now, I've been involved in the club for something like 6 years, so it was nice to see a bunch of people who I hadn't seen for a long time, people from both Japan and Stanford. One of them was Misako, who was hilarious! Oh my god, she tells the best stories.

Ok, I have some errands to do, so I'm going to leave off of the story for now and take care of them. Stay tuned for the rest of the Tokyo part of the trip and the Mie Prefecture chapter. 8^)

EDIT: I added the photos. See above for the links to the individual albums in context. For the general album, please visit http://picasaweb.google.com/mastercko