We’ll start by taking a nice, comfy, and impressively fast shinkansen bullet train into the heart of the city, exiting at the Tokyo terminal. Another quick ride will take us to the infamous Ueno park where we will spend an unforgettable afternoon marveling at one of Japanese’s most endearing pastimes: the spring cherry blossoms! Ueno is known to be one of the very best parks to walk through and more than once since I first found out that I would be coming to Japan has it been recommended to me to take the time to visit. So there’s another thing to check off on my “Japanese To-Do List!”
We’ll then head over to Harajuku, the young and rather eccentric shopping district near the Meiji Jingu Shrine. Let’s grab a quick coffee at a nearby café and begin to make our way over to the shrine when, AHH, what are the chances?!?
Our dear friend Mai Maruyama who was one of the four Rotex on the August orientation trip last fall runs into us on the crowded streets of Tokyo!! This has to be a joke, we only know about 10 people in the whole city and yet we still end up running into one of them. With a population of over 12 million people, you know our timing had to be perfect!
Still in shock from such a chance meeting, we walk into the impressive Meiji Jingu Shrine park. Taking time to enjoy the area’s sights, we hang around until we can meet up with Noriko-San & friends (those who we went to Gunma Prefecture with last week).
We sit down for a nice ice cream cone, catch up on the events of the past few days, and take a stroll past the Olympic stadium on our way to Shibuya. We’ll window shop past some of Tokyo’s nicest shops and eventually find ourselves in the jam-packed Shibuya square. From there we’ll hop in a comfy Tokyo cab and head to dinner.
You know, it always helps when you’ve got a relative who owns a well-known, yet back street Izakaya pub. In this case it is my host father, Hiroshi-san’s, youngest brother, Daisuke (That's him on the right).
The bar’s name is Houzuki and it is fit into a quiet Ikejiri Neighborhood building, surrounded by tall apartment buildings, simple fruit and vegetable marts, and a tiny temple somehow squeezed in between. Because it is off the beaten path, the small restaurant has become a nice get-away for different celebrities looking for a great meal, quiet atmosphere, and some good drinks. Luckily we’ve come on a Thursday night, so for most of the meal we’ll have the place to ourselves. Still, Daisuke is putting on a great show, whipping up round after round of delicious Japanese-fusion dishes, each more delicious than the last. Before long we’re warm, happy, laughing, and content. It’s evenings like this that one can’t help but sit back and smile, thinking that the next few years at college are most likely going to be filled with cheap pizza and ramen noodles, so thank god for nights like these! It seems like no time at all before we’re climbing back into the cab, waving good-bye to Noriko-San, Al, and the Wang’s, and on a bullet train back home.
So there you go, the days go by pretty fast when they look like this…
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