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11-08-02
Lack of sleep finally caught up to me this morning when I woke up at 10am. Receiving a total of 8 hours of sleep confused my body terribly. So Leah was still comatose and i was freezing cold, so I started reading her Culture Shock book of Japan, which I ended up getting through 90 pages of before Leah completely woke up. The book reinforced what Leah was talking about regarding the Japanese and how they spend more on eating and clothes than on their homes. There were interesting things as well as things that I had all ready knew regarding the culture. As I was reading the book and she was attempting to drag herself out of bed she said that I should be reading the Japanese slang book instead and I just wasn't that interested in looking at. i had seen it before and I read a little bit of it and it is well written but i just left apathetic to it. For breakfast I had my greentea icecream from the previous night. It was good and then we had the bread that she bought the previous day for breakfast. I received an e-mail from Cecilia concerning our plans for the day and and e-mailed her back. She ended up calling me and telling me about how her group had just called her and told her at 1 that they were getting together. Since I told her that Asakusa was not that far from school that she should come when she was done since it did not seem like her group was enthusiastic about it and that they would probably want to get it done as soon as possible. She agreed and then said that she would. Leah and I smashed ourselves onto the train, and i had my bookbag since I did not think that it would be cost productive to leave it at her place since it was far away on the Odakyu line. We got to Shinjuku, transfered to the chou-sobu line then got off at askusa-bashi, and then had to take the asukusa line to asukusa. I wanted to walk and Leah just thought that I was crazy.... so we ended up taking the subway and we got off at exit A5 and had no difficultly finding the main street. Some guys were holding maps and pointing to them and I think talking to us in English, but we couldn't understand them. Leah ignored them while I said "daijoubu" We headed down the main street and they had lots of stuff, and go figure practically every single shop accepted Visa. I saw tons of trinkets, dolls, kimonos, fans, hair pieces, shoes, bags, yakuta, traditional shoes, pictures, buddha's, noren, etc.... it was cool, but I was a woman on a mission, I wanted a noren that is why I came. Then we ended up stopping at this kimono store since I thought that I would look at the Yakuta. Yeah I ended up buying a cotten kimono... It was too nice... I could not resist... As we kept walking down the street different vendors had different food. The food with the sweet beans in the middle, yaki soba, tako.. hmmmm tako... Then I was looking at the different pouches that they had for lunches. Then we got to the temple which was extremely pretty. We stopped to get something to eat hmmmm tako which had shrimp as well as octopus in it. Naturally we were still hungry, so I bought fried mochi and it was not that great. We ended up going off the street and there were a bunch of stores with toys which were really cool, but a lot of them consisted of the older toys. We opted to get back on the main street to look for some more food. We bought fried anman, mine was greentea though and sooo good.... Next Leah said she needed my help in deciding on a doll to buy. So we went to this one shop and i gave her my advice on which ones I liked since I am sooo damn picky. Then we walked a bit and some of the stores had a bunch of toys which was really cool. Then we finally meet up with Cecilia, and Leah ended up buying the doll that I suggested that was number one and it was the last one. Leah felt it was a sign, and I thought it was just that I had good taste :) Anyway we ended up going to this one store and I kept asking the woman if I could look at different noren since none of them were doing anything for me. I did like this one with the samurai in this ancient makeup, but it was not enough to buy it... I don't know why since I guess I wanted on of the geisha's but all of their faces were strange. So leah was annoyed at how picky I was, and then we went to another shop and I looked at the stuff and was not throughly impressed, and then ended up going back to her shop and buying something to carry my bento box in. I was happy :) Next store I went in I decided to buy the one noren of the samurai but he was in a different pose. i was happy, leah was cold, wanting food and Cecilia was wanting shoes. Yeah I ended finding this store that had all of these Totoro stuff, and Ghibli stuff and they even had Totoro noren.... I wanted to kick myself.... it was 3,200 and I felt like I had all ready spent enough for the day. We ended up walking to this street called Orange Street, and looking at these traditional tea sets and they had a real bento box for 2,000 yen.... sooo want it... Then we all realized that it would be ungodly expensive to eat any place around the area so we opted to go back towards the station and we found this little traditional place. Leah ordered Tsukeyaki, which was the fried mochi, and Ceceil ordered tokoroten, which was this clean noodle in this odd sauce, which had an odd kick. i ordered oden...hmmm... oden... that is good stuff :) I ended up being the only one to get something decent. After finishing eating we went back to Starbucks and then Leah needed to get going, Ceceil followed in suit because Marade was waiting, so I did not want the night to end, so we parted ways and I did intend to walk to Akihabara but I did not which way to go and since everything was unfamiliar it did not feel safe. I ended up buying the ticket for the wrong line and i ended up going on the Ginza line to Kanda and transfered to the chou sobu. When I was on the way home these two Japanese guys were talking about me. I did not know specifically but you can always tell... it becomes rather annoying sometimes. i walked back to dorm, put up my new stuff, and grabbed something little to eat.
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