Too Much Food

Today, I had too much food.  Breakfast was just cereal, but then we went to go to that ramen restaurant we tried to go to the other day.  It was closed again, so we went to another one.

Look, even the weeds here are pretty.

Here's what I had at the restaurant.  It was very, very filling.

After that, we went to a mall.  The only differences between this one and say, Perimeter Mall, are that this one has a flea market sort of thing going on in it, and the roof only covers the walkways.  It's essentially outside, but has all the same sorts of stores.

After that, I took my bike back to a place I saw on the way to the ramen restaurant.  HERE'S A DISPLAY FOR THE NEW ONE PIECE GAME.

This women's college is kind of scary-looking.

Look at how green.

On the way back, I bought this bottle of milk tea entirely because of the name.  I don't know what direction they were aiming by naming it "Smart Times", but they swung and they missed.  It also came with the little bear man you can see on the top.  Narsha from Brown Eyed Girls loves those things, but I think it's ugly and I wish all I'd gotten was the tea.

I FOUND THE SPIRITOMB FIGURE (right).  My goal with these things is to represent all of my team from Pokemon Black in plastic, so I'll be keeping an eye out for the other four while I'm here.  Every toy section of every huge store here has them, so it's just a matter of which Pokemon are in stock.
In case you're wondering, all my Pokemon are scary Pokemon.  In fact, Spiritomb is the only Pokemon out of 649 that is inherently evil.  The other one is Gothitelle, who is considerably nicer.

This is a special cracker from Osaka that is supposed to taste like okonomiyaki, a local specialty down there.  It tasted like that for a bit, then like gingerbread, then tasted like it was supposed to again.  Kind of weird.

AKIBAHARA

Today we went to Akihabara.  I know I spelled it wrong in the title.  Wesley gets it.

Anyway, Akihabara is nerd town.  There is an entire district of Tokyo for that.  It's a wonderful and magical place where the anime goods stretch for many blocks and no one believes in elevators.  Well, that's not entirely true.  Most of the anime stores go straight up about six floors or so, with each floor specializing in something different.  The stores are so cramped that the elevators are hard to get hold of, so we did a lot of walking up stairs.
First of all, though, we went to see Yui-sama's voice acting agency's building.  Guess what!  It was also an apartment building, and for that reason we couldn't go in.  You would think that we got the wrong building because it was apartments, but in Japan that doesn't mean you can't have an office on one floor.  In lieu of anything exciting, I just took a picture of the "no entry" sign.



And then the building's nameplate, just to prove I was there.

In the distance in the picture below, you can see Tokyo Skytree.  It's a giant tower you can go inside, like Tokyo Tower or the Eiffel Tower, but bigger.  It also opened just this past week, and so it is all over the news.  When no one's getting murdered or kidnapped in a country with no twenty-four-hour news channels, these are the kinds of things they report on.  Also funny cats.

This is a multi-story arcade run by Sega.  One thing you must know about Japanese arcades is that they all smell like smoke.  The other thing to know is that if you had an infinite supply of change and an immunity to lung cancer, you would never have a reason to leave one.



I finally played Tekken Tag Tournament 2.  I did very, very well for having never played Tekken with a stick before (usually I do fighting games with a PS2/PS3 controller), being super rusty at playing as Lili, and having not played as True Ogre since I was probably twelve years old.  I got all the way to the last boss (Unknown) with very little difficulty, and then she showed why she's a Tekken boss character by doing some obnoxiously damaging attacks that I'd never seen before.  ALSO I GOT TO HEAR LILI SPEAK FRENCH, which they made her do in this game since that's how it should've been all along (she is from Monaco).

Dinner was small, but so full of novelty that I was very satisfied.  We ate at the Gundam Cafe near the station, which is just a theme cafe based on a popular and long-running anime franchise wherein war is waged with giant robots (mobile suits), the strongest of which are usually called Gundams.  The only Gundam series I actually care that much about is G Gundam, the one most Gundam fans hate, but that's okay because I am all for theme restaurants.  I had the "Char's Zaku Rice" (Char is a character, a Zaku is a type of robot, and the dish was made to look like said robot's head, seen by clicking here) and the "Char's Zaku Smoothie" just because.  They weren't bad, but the smoothie was very, very orange-flavored and was probably the better of the two things.

Here are things I got.  The newspaper is a free paper about anime music, which covers a wide variety of genres but is often treated as its own thing.  That's Nana Mizuki on the front, and she's wonderful.  Moving on, in the middle you will see two metal dangly things I bought for my phone that are based on Fate/Zero.  On either side of those is a CD by 電気式華憐音楽集団, Yui-sama's other band.  You don't know how exciting it is to have these CDs.  In America, to get them I'd have to have a third party buy them, then ship them to me, because online stores that ship to America do not carry this band.  I've done that before, and it ended up costing me $80 for a $30 CD (but there was no other way).  So yeah, this is much better.

Blurgh

Nothing happened today.  I went to school again, talked to Nana, Misaki, Nagatomo, Jun, Natsuko, etc, and that was about it.  I feel it is worth noting that Jun likes to practice his English in a very robotic way, to the point that he tries to have entire conversations with you by reading his parts from a book.  And the book's not always right.  Never before today had I participated in a conversation that BEGAN with "Let's change the subject."

Too Many Pictures, Too Many Smiles

Today we went to the area at the base of Mt. Fuji.  I have pictures.  many, many pictures.  So many pictures, in fact, that I will only be giving commentary when absolutely necessary.



Tunnels in Japan are long and numerous.

I don't think this really needed to be a sign.  I feel like improper toilet use is not a big enough problem to necessitate a sign in every stall.

Rest stop.

Breakfast.

Mountains.

Mt. Fuji.

And again.

I don't know what this was, but I think it was a bizarrely-designed restaurant.

This was a car dealership.  This lot.  That's all.

Lake.

GIANT KOI.

WE FED THEM.

GLORP GLORP GLORP

The primary purpose of our visit was to go to my host dad's father's grave.  It's at this nice cemetery, where the only sounds were birds, wind, and VROOM VROOM VROOM from the nearby Fuji Speedway race track.

VROOM VROOM VROOM

We also stopped to visit some relatives of my host family.  They lived in this house, which was about as fancy inside as the gardens outside.

Except we didn't get to go inside.  I'm just going on what I saw from the door.  Anyway, that's the end of the garden.  If I didn't separate these, they'd look like they were part of the garden.

But they're a shrine.  A fancy shrine dedicated to Mt. Fuji.

I have no idea who this horse is or why he has a statue to which you can offer your wishes, and neither did my host family.

This was at another rest stop.  It's a hot spring, but only for your feet.  You're supposed to walk around on those rocks there and come out feeling like you had the best foot massage ever.  It works.

They had Mt. Fuji ice cream.

And a Mt. Fuji rice ball.  Guess which one I got.

It was "blue rose" flavor, so imagine rose flavor, but blue.

Kumomoto is not know for mangoes at all, so I have no idea why Kumamon is on this package.

For lunch I had daikon soba.  It's like soba but with radish.

The biggest swan boat.

More mountains, and that's where the Fuji part of today ends.  After that I went to school and talked to Kayo and Misaki for a while, and then I walked home.

This is the road I took home.  It goes through lots of fields, and so I was the only person on it.  It was the best.

One of today's cafe customers got to go to Tokyo Skytree (this Eiffel Tower-ish thing that just opened and is obnoxiously tall), which every news station is talking about these days.  He gave us some Skytree chocolate, which was pretty good.  Mostly I just liked it because it was probably limited-edition since the place opened just yesterday.

Tomorrow is probably karaoke and more school talking.  WHOOOOOO