First full day ...

Okay, so I am going to skip the flight over ... maybe I will cover it later but I am running short on time in this internet cafe here so I am going to cover the essentials:

Monday, May 15.
Since we were all still jet-lagged, we woke up early today (430) to go to the Tokyo fish market. I actually wasnt tired at all, so it was okay that it took almost 2 hours to get there via train and subway. On the way there we met a crazy Japanese guy on the train. He didn:t speak any english but insisted on taking all of our pictures ... individually. we tried to tell him no, but it didnt work. Mary was especialy disturbed because he pretended to take a picture of her crotch. yikes. anyway, when we transferred to the subway we left our new friend and made it to the fish market. in a word: insane. Our group of 20 got split up among the aisles and aisles of frozen fish and salespeople peddling their wares. it was pretty neat -- except for the smell and the fact that the floor was soaked with water, blood, and other fish juices.

After the lovely fish adventure we went to Shinjuku -- the busiest train station in the world -- to find coffee since the majority of people here are addicted to it (including me). All the sizes here are super small, even though things cost the same as or a little more than they do in America. I guess that is why everyone here is so thing. We went up to the tallest observatory in Tokyo, the metropolitan government building, and took some pictures from the deck. it was cool because you could really see how vast the city is. our group, which had reunited before leaving the fish market, split again into two groups and i went to the park and shrine with 9 or 10 others. Everyone else went to the stock exchange. the park was huge and VERY densely forested with the main shrine in the center. It was free (yay) and definitely worth the trouble we had finding it -- we thought we could just follow the path we saw from the observatory, but we were wrong. oh well. we made it there. After leaving we ate lunch at Yoyogi sttion ... a place called First Kitchen. The workers spoke limited english and so i ended up accidentally getting these weird curry fries. they really like curry over here, i guess ... anyway, the fries were good -- surprisingly.

If finding the shrine was hard, finding the museum was harder. we were trying to go to a beer museum but instead walked aimlessly through a neighborhood (we only knew what subway stop it was) and finally found an English speaker who copied her map and pointed us in the right direction. Unfortunately, it was closed on Mondays (that seems to be quite common here). Since that was a bust, we went back to Shinjuku and walked through the grounds of a boarding school where hordes of young Japanese girls waved and giggled at us; crazy americans. i started to feel sick and went back to senshu. since we only get one room key i couldnt get into the room and went into jodi and veronicas (where they were asleep) and crashed on the floor for about 2 hours, until 1930. we woke up and decided to grab something to eat so we were walking down to the station and ran into chris and the professors (chris was the only one who hadnt gone to the fish market so he had gone to mount fuji with the professors). we decided we didnt want to point and guess at our food again -- or spend a lot -- so we went to mcdonalds. hooray. still not fully adjusted to the time, we hit the sack at between 10 and 1030. and thus ended the day.

Grant