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Trip to Japan, Part 3 (Day 4) |
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Well, the day started out amazing! We woke up to a huge breakfast made by Takako, who is an excellent cook! There was a fluffy omlet and much fruit and other various items and tea! Aaaahhh....ureshi!!! heart _ heart
Yatsutaka, Jun's dad, wanted to take a few pictures and we were off for the seaboard! When we got there we found it was much cooler but still very humid. I also got to see my very first palm trees! And we went on an old Spanish Galley Ship which was awesome! Then they took us into this cute little mall to get lunch.
This is where Chris acctually bought his first beer out of a vending machine! I also got to try something new called Takoyaki, or an octopus ball that looks like a burnt meatball. It was sooooooooo good^^ Remember that I said this as later on you will laugh at the irony of that statement! We went shopping a little before going to the aquarium. Chris bought a T-shirt that says "condominium was deserted" ....don't ask. It's Engrish. He also bought me a moonstone ring! I was suprised but happy. We don't have ANY moonstone in Colorado!
We finally made it to the aquarium and saw a lot of neat sealife I've never seen before, including dolphins! And we watched a really cool dolphine show! And ate ice cream and drank melon soda! It was awesome. After that Yatsutaka and Takako left to go home and Jun and Ai took us shopping at a bookstore that was more like a Spencers. We bought most of the souviners for o0ur friends back home there and then Chris got the suprise of his life!!!
That will be in the next post of course!
 Iyona · Sat Aug 13, 2005 @ 04:59am · 0 Comments |
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Trip to Japan, Part 3 (Day 3) |
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The next morning we got to eat another one of those amazing breakfasts at the hotel's all you can eat buffet! Awww man....I sure miss it! Anyway, we had to check our bags and take our carry ons and put them in this guy's car so we could get 'em later. We were then herded back insode, after everyone else left for their homestays. (We had picked Nagoya and were last ones 'cause we were staying in town)
The Japanese instructor from Austrailia took us on the subway and we rode around town until we got off at our stop and started walking for a while. We had some freetime as we got to see the Buhdist temple that houses Budah's ashes! We have lots of pictures and stuff!
Then we went to a museum and had a tea cerimony! The mochi had glod leaf in it and I ate it... 3nodding and the tea was good. We walked around and looked at really old Japanese clothing and the house was really cool! After that we were taken to an art gallery. There was some good art in there but we were tired from lack of sleep and miserable because it was so hot....thus we ended up sitting down for most of the time we were there and tried to decide what to do for lunch.
We were going to go to a restraunt but the Austrailian guys we met told us to go with them to the supermarket. We were thinking "Don't you have to cook stuff you buy there? We want to go to a restraunt!" but they told us to come with them anyway and lo and behold, there was a lot of cooked food! They even had bento boxes and I got tempura and a marble soda and stuff! We ate and had a lot of fun with the Ausies and then the rest of the people met up with us again and we went to a house called "Yookoso"
In this house, and only inside, Chris and I had really bad verdigo...but once outside, we were better again. In the basement of Yookoso, we learned about Kyougin theatre and I was put on stage in a gold kimono! Neat huh? And then this guy gave a speech...I fogot the whole thing because I was so out of it, and then Jun came and picked us up. We got our luggage and went to his car and he took us towards his house. We wanted to see a beer vending machine and he found one for us so we could take a picture. Then we went to his house.
OUr room was very nice! Theire whole house was very nice! We sat and talked to Jun for a while and then his sister, Nanako, brought a friend over to spend the night. Her name was Ai. Anyway, their mom, Takako, made us this awesome sushi dinner and we talked a lot and then we took a bath.
I thought the bath was shallow but it was about 3 feet deep and hot water so I came out red! sweatdrop I warned Chris about it but he didn't listen and the same thing happened to him! Ha ha! We had our first 8 hour sleep that night and woke up fresh and ready to see Nagoya! Jun's family was taking us to the aquarium and stuff! Since this is getting into the next day, I will do a new post for it.
Iyona · Wed Jul 27, 2005 @ 04:47am · 0 Comments |
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Trip to Japan, Part 2 (Day 2) Continued again! |
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Okay, so you wanna know about the acrades in Japan? Well, we walked around the outdoor mall and stopped at a book store where we found a TON of manga. It was about $3 to $5 for a book so we loaded up on manga, which is in Japanese so don't bother getting any unless you can read it. We found this three story arcade! Oh man, is was awesome! The whole bottom floor was a Pachinko parlor!
....? What's Pachinko? Well, in Japan, gambling is illegal. But Japan's got some wierd loopholes in their laws. For example, you eat a hallucnigenic mushroom to get high and the cops catch you. If you tell 'em you ate it because you were hungry, they let you go. Wierd huh? No, I don't do drugs! Stop looking at me like that! Someone I know did it and told me, okay?
Anyway, so you buy some of these little steel Pachinko balls and go up to a machine and pour 'em in and they bounce around like pinballs and line up in rows. You can win even more balls, or lose a bunch. When you're done you go to the counter with your balls and you can get prizes. One of them is a card. If you take this card accross the street somewhere, there will be a little booth and you can "sell your card" for the amount of money you won in the Pachinko hall. Sean put $5 in and left with $200! Cool huh?
The second and third stories of this arcade had the games. We played on the DDR machine and the games that would normally give you tickets pop out anime goodies instead. Chris played this one game 3 times and each time he won a Negima card. He gave them to me! Woo! I have Nadoka, Conoca, and that other girl I forget her name. Everyone here wants them but I'm not selling!
The 3rd floor had the "old games" that no one plays anymore, like Tekken 5. Yeah, I know we just got that here but its old over there. There was this one boxing game that Sean played and he was pretty good. So it's about 11pm there and we are very tired so we all go back to the Hotel to sleep...except Sean who went out and got drunk.
As I was waiting for the shower, I looked out my window on the 19th floor and look down only to see the funniest thing. This man in his car backs into a tree and the emergency lights start to flash. Well, he just gets out and looks at his car and walks away all casually and never came back sweatdrop I laughed so hard! I guess he was drunk.
That's the end of day 2...technically day 1 as far as us getting to do stuff. The next morning was our homestay session soooo.....I had to get up at 7am to be at the front on time xd
Iyona · Sat Jul 23, 2005 @ 07:14am · 0 Comments |
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The Trip To Japan, Part 2 (Day 2) (continued) |
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Before we went to the Toyota museum, we got to go to the Naritake Gardens. It was pretty cool driving in because there was a field of pinwheels! It was odd but pretty. We had a choice of 3 tours and we chose the "shopping tour" which gave us one hour of free time. Chris and I went and ordered our first meal in Japanese...our first meal that wasn't already paid for. This is because I didn't get a chance to eat at the Expo and was getting very weak. I got this awesome sandwitch picknick thing. One was egg and seaweed, and the other had seaweed, dandylion, tuna, and pastromi. It was really good...also got 3 sausaages and a marble soda with it! Woo...all that for just 800 yen (that's about $ cool .
We shopped around a bit and I picked up a couple of nice tea cups with sakura painted on them. Then we were herded back onto the bus and taken to the Toyota museum. We were given headphones and sent off into the museum to do a self guided tour. Toyota was originally in the cotton and fabric industry so there were a lot of old artifacts on how early period clothing was made. Continuing on through the museum I got to see a loom make a cute blanket with the Expo characters on it. Then couldn't take Chris's complaining anymore! "Where are all the cars..." stare I went with him into the other room and saw the biggest room! Two stories of Toyota car stuff. Chris was very happy so I let him run around while I took his video camera and made a little documentary for him. The coolest thing in there was the prototype for Toyota's "Car of the Future." It looked like something out of a futuristic space movie!
We were called to the room where we were supposed to take part in the opening ceremony of the Grassroots Sumit. The sumit was the real reason we got to go to Japan in the first place. I had never seen so much sushi, sashimi, tempura, udon.....and most of all...sake in my life! In fact, what I thought was apple juice even had sake in it. The only odd thing was they had fried chicken there. The food was so good! rofl Before we got to eat we listened to a couple of speeches and drank sake and watched the mechanical dolls from way before machines were really invented. One picked up an arrow, put it on the bow, pulled back, and shot at a target! It was awesome! Then I saw Jun's nametag and said hi, confusing him. Jun hadn't met me before but he was the one we were doing our homestay with so I couldn't just ignore him. And then we ate and went back to the hotel.
After that we took off and went to the arcade around the corner of our hotel. This will be in the next post as this one is getting rather long.
Iyona · Wed Jul 20, 2005 @ 03:50am · 0 Comments |
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The Trip To Japan, Part 2 (Day 2) |
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Waking up was incredibly difficult, having only gotten 4 hours of sleep. We made our way downstairs, ears popping at the altitude drop in the elevator, and entered the 4th floor dining room. We got free breakfast and I never had such a good one!
This was the wierdest breakfast I have seen in my life. It was an all you can eat buffet with Seaweed, steamed salmon, wonton and/or miso soup and these awesome dumpling things, steamed jasmine rice, raw egg, boiled egg, fruit (cherries, melon, orange, cucumber, banana), then...bacon, scrambled egg, pancakes with kiwi sauce, bread rolls so fresh heart _ heart and so much more. To drink you could choose milk, tomato juice, orange or grapefruit juice or tea/coffee. That was interesting.
We ate and ran back to our rooms to get ready and off we went to the Aichi 2005 world Expo! What a fancy bus and I have never seen so many people in my life! The Expo gets something like 65,000 visitors a day! And the schoolgirls skirts really are as short as they are in anime. The little kids loved us and kept saying "Herro!" and walking along with their squeeky shoes (I will explain much later.)
Some of you might be wondering what a guy could use as the best pickup line in Japan. All you have to do is turn to a group of high school girls and say "Hello" in English. They freak out and scream and jump up and down and try to speak to you in English (but they aren't very good at it) It cute, really.
We saw several shows in the Expo, including a Chinese concert and walking, talking robots in the Mitsubishi pavilion...which also had a short movie "What if the moon didn't exist?"....in a 3 side surround screen theatre with mirrors on the cieling and floor...it was like sitting inside a colidoscope! We had to leave soon after this in order to catch our buss to the Toyota museum. Before we get into that, let me tell you what Chris discovered at the Expo, and he is so addicted to it I'm suprised he hasn't had it shiped to his house yet! It's a drink called Qoo. Some of you may have heard of it (or not)? Anyway, picture Sunny D only about 1000 times better! And it comes in many different flavors but orange is the best.
Okay, now that we have that out of the way, I shall continue posting about the Toyota museum in the next post.
Iyona · Wed Jul 13, 2005 @ 04:57am · 0 Comments |
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The trip to Japan, Part 1 (The first day) |
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The plane got delayed on the runway for 2 hours, which was pointless because the fleight was supposed to be 2 hours from here to San Fransisco, which supposedly had bad weather (that was not true. people told me so!)
Got in the air and landed in San Fransisco, needed to get on the ANA fleight to Nartia airport in Tokyo, and we got through the internation airport security stuff and on the plane in about 5 min because they had delayed the plane that long. There were 30 people that needed that fleight to Narita which were on my fleight from Denver, so we made it. This fleight was 11.5 hours long! It really sucked because the sun followed us and I didn't get any sleep. Finally landed in Narita and had to transfer to yet another fleight to Nagoya. Got on a bus and went to the Grand Court Hotel, Nagoya. I was on the 19th floor and my ears had to pop in the elevator every time I went to/from my room! Great view of Nagoya, incredible room!
Got very little sleep that night because we had to get up at 7am to eat an amazing breakfast and get ready to go to the World Expo in Aichi! Woo! That was AWESOME!!!!!!!! (About the Expo in the next post. I'm dead tired and going to bed now. Ja ne!)
Iyona · Sat Jul 09, 2005 @ 06:55am · 0 Comments |
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I just typed this for the Wyverex 2 RP in the guild but it's not working so instead of losing what I just typed, I'm pasteing it here so I can post it later. Hopefully this will work.
The post:
Rurik- ........................*The dark figure laughs and vanishes. Diana stands firmly and shows no emotion. She saw the whole thing as she can see in the dark just like it was day*
........*She brushes herself off*
Tony- What are you so calm about?! That guy just took your fiance!
*She looks at Tony and shakes her head* I thought something like this might happen so we prepared for it last night. Kaiser did tell us that the Dreg things wanted Rurik for some reason, so this was sort of planned, right honey?
*Rurik steped out of the shadows and shuddered*
Rurik- Oh man, don't put me in that wierd place again. That was creepy....I take it the dude fell for the bait?
Yeah.
Tony- Holy.....wait, how did you do that? *He's scratching his head*
We'll explain later. *She walks over to Kaiser* Pheonix! *The spell revives him and she has Amy heal him* Are you okay?
Iyona · Fri Jun 17, 2005 @ 05:10am · 0 Comments |
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The b-day party that rocked! |
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Yeah, it was awesome. Something like 200 people rotated through that party throughout the day. We borrowed a house that my friend Orion lives in and set it up all Piratey, and then hooked up a PS2 for the nerds downstairs.
I'm so smart I made it a potluck party, so everyone brought something and we all had plenty of food! Wooo! Outside was like, 90 degrees so we had a watergun war and that was fun. By the time you had to refill, you were dry already. This also allowed us to find a dead squirel in the pine tree by where the dog always is. Yeah, that was odd.
After that, I wrapped a towel around my waist and wandered downstairs to find people wanted to play DDR, so we put that in and started playing. I was in the middle of Holic on Heavy (8 ft song mind you) and doing really good when someone ran down with my cell phone and told me I had a call. I didn't wanna stop playing so I answered it and talked to Brondon about how to get to the party while playing and my tpwel was startingto fall off so I was fixing that with my other hand. After I hung up and the song was over, I thought I'd really messed up but looked at my rating...an A! Wow, I've never done THAT before!
So lotsa people played that while I went and ate, hung out...chated with peeps and then Chris decided it was time to cut the watermellon. Now, before we get into that, let me describe this house. You walk in and there are a lot of real swords and stuff right by the door. ......and that's all I'm going to say right now.
Well, I guess he thought he was being funny because he went and picked one out, and walked outside. Orion saw this and took the sword and looked at it and shook his head. It wasn't good enough. So he went inside and came out with a katana and was walking to the watermellon like an exicutioner but one of the boards of the deck broke under him and he fell. No one got hurt or anything, so don't worry. Well, they handed the sword to me and I cut it in slices with the katana...and we have pictures of this! Hehe heh! That was a good watermellon!
The rest of the party will be posted soon, as I have to go tonight. Later.
Iyona · Tue Jun 07, 2005 @ 07:55am · 0 Comments |
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Yeay, my birthday is coming up and I'm having a huge party! I'm enviting everyone I know and it's going to be HUGE! I turn 21 this year! Yeay. I decided to theme the party Pirates and Fantasy.
I might have a giai birthday party too! We'll see^^
Iyona · Tue May 10, 2005 @ 09:30pm · 3 Comments |
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Help me make this please! I'm almost there!