March

What's Saint Patricks Day without a parade and lots of green beer? Well, there was big hype about this parade in the English magazine, Metropolis. So, after a long night at Eurohouse (like usual), a couple of us met up to go to this parade. We made it about half way through, but really it was just groups of people circling around the street with banners. I guess that is what a parade is though, isn't it?


There were masses of crowds however, and I'd say about 70% were foreigners. Most had on green and the silly hats and such that we are accustomed to in the states. But, after the parade, everything just died out. It was kind of weird.


So, we decided to pack up a few beers and head to Yoyogi Park. It's a great park in the center of Tokyo. Sunday afternoons are great here because there is live music, heaps of people, and little ones running around. Being at this park sorta makes you forget that you are in the hustle bustle of Tokyo.


Rie, John, Lisa and I found a little chunk of grass to drink our cans of beer on. The sun was out but it was still a bit chilly.


We got to see a beautiful sunset between the tree's.


Next up for March, was bellydancing night at our local gaijin bar, Ocean Deep. Every Thursday, they have the event, where from like 7 - 8:30 you can take a bellydance lesson with a group of japanese women, for something like 1,000 yen (which includes a drink). Then, after the class, from about 9pm, they have a bellydance show. I LOVE it!

I asked my Japan family to come with me. They are a family that I teach on Monday nights and occasionally do other things with. When I first came to Japan, I taught their daughter, Aoi, at Little Garden Preschool. After I left the school, they asked me to come to their home and teach. Since then, they have become my family away from home. I love them!


Bellydancing here is a bit different from the dancing I have seen back home. However, the teacher is from a country (Morocco maybe), where the dance is probably more authentic that that I have seen in America.

After Bellydancing, we went out for a night of karaoke. It was so fun. I think it may have been my best Karaoke yet in Japan. We had a blast!


Above is Yoko (Aoi and Ai's Mommy) and Kikuko (Yoko's sister). I teach Kikuko and Yoko's husband, Satoru. They were so much fun at Karaoke!


Kyoko also came along. She is always fun to have at Karaoke. And, she always busts out the tamborine! She is my longest term student. I met her in February, about a month after I arrived in Japan and we have been good friends since.


After a few hours of Nomihodai (all you can drink), it was about time to go home :)


Satoru is the one on the left (Yoko's husband) and Masahiro is on the right (Kikuko's husband). We had SOOO much fun!


The next day, we went to Oasis. Oasis is Jeremy's favorite (one of the top 5 I guess) The concert was in Kaihin Makuhari at the Messe hall. It was a fun concert, but kind of a shitty venue. The only reason I say that is because it was standing room only (two sections of general admission) and the floor was all level, so if you were in the back, like we were, you couldn't see anything unless you got on your toes, and that was only because we were like 6-8 inches taller than most of the others there. Jeremy loved the concert. He knew all the songs. I knew like 5, so I wasn't equally impressed. But, I had a good time busting out Champagne Supernova when they sang it.

The next Friday night, we had Josh and Lisa come over for dinner. We made Sushi!!! it was a lot of fun. I hadn't tried making sushi since we first got here. It's quite expensive to buy all the goodies that you need to make a good piece of sushi (nigiri or roll style). Though, we had a lot of fun, trying out different things.

Since our kitchen is the size of a ritz cracker, we brought the assembly line out to the living room. It is here, where we made our artsy rolls and such.


Lisa came a little later, but she still got to help out a bit.

One of our 3 plates of finished products. We made WAYYY too much and had quite a bit leftover. Who would have guessed I would overdo something of the sorts??? ha ha!


Lisa had organized a Birthday party for Josh at an Izakaya in Funabashi that same weekend. It was an all out drinking extravaganza! Unfortunately, I decided it would be a good idea to have some hot sake AFTER all the beer and cocktails. I was not happy the next morning for sure!



However, I had a great time while we were there. You know I've had a bit to drink when I start busting out the self portraits. I'll only torture you with one or two :o).


Josh wore a sash that said "special guest" in Japanese. He wore it proudly.

Meghan and Josh's friend Aaron.


Towards the end of the night, we got all mushy, thinking about Josh and Lisa leaving soon. It happens.


Thank goodness for my little daily planner, which I have learned to record everything I do in. Because of it, I can still write these blogs, months after the events have happened. I'm trying to get up to date with my trip home (April ish).

February

February started out with a 'Girls Night'. I met Rie and Lisa for wine at an actual wine bar called, "Pub Jack", in Gyotoku. First, we went for dinner to a Hiroshima style okonomiyaki restaurant. It was different, but good.

After dinner, we went to the wine bar and left the place with purple lips. Needless to say, I woke up with a headache the next day that could almost kill a person. I haven't been wine-drunk since.

It was nice to get to know a couple of new girls... We were chatty and talked about boys. It was great fun!


As part of Jeremy's Christmas present, I bought him tickets to Coldplay, one of his top three favorite bands. He was very excited, and this concert was AWESOME! It was up in Saitama, Jeremy's old playground (from his first trip to Japan), and the concert arena was great. We were up in the nosebleeds, but still had a great view of everything, and they really knew how to put on a great show.


The band played for a couple of hours and played all but one of Jeremy's 'favorite' songs. I think it comes in a close second for the Green Day concert I went to a few years back with Cari. That was an AMAZING show!


Also in February, I went to a beer festival in Asakusa, with the folks below (Lisa, Josh, Rie, and John) It was like $30, and they gave you 10 tickets and a glass. We could try 10 different beers. In Japan, the typical lineup is Asahi Super Dry, Kirin, and usually one other that tastes about the same as the other two... However, at this festival, we got to try locally brewed micro's that were great. It was like a taste of home.


We had a good time.


After the beerfest, we went to Ocean Deep to watch John perform with his band. The night before beerfest was full of excitement as well. It's the night where Jeremy and I joined Marta and Cody for dinner to celebrate their Birthdays and whatnot, we ended up going to Karaoke and then to Eurohouse, and on the way home, Jeremy found out a guy he used to teach had just committed suicide. On top of that, Marta crashed on her bike in some gravel and really tore up her knee, but didn't want to go to the doctor and didn't have any medicine... so I had to hike it up to 7Eleven and then play doctor. She was very grateful, and 3 months later I hear it has healed nicely.

Meghan planned a surprise Birthday party for Marta on one of the weekends. I went with them, and then Lisa came later. The next morning we were getting up at like 5am to go snowboarding in Gunma with Kyoko and her big group of people. However, knowing that, we still drank too much and traveled to Gunma with hangovers.


Gunma was a lot of fun. I wish I hadn't been so stupid in drinking so much, but I did and so I didn't get to enjoy the trip as much as I could have. However, the hotel was amazing, the food delicious, and the company was very friendly. We had a drinking party one night after dinner, which resulted in this fashion show of sorts...



John, Lisa, and Josh joined Jeremy and I with Kyoko, Tadahiro and many of their friends.

January

I have realized that I am not going to be able to go back and write about each and every exciting thing that I have done over the past three months individually. So, my solution is to just write random blogs about all the those things and carry on so that I can just write when I feel like it. That being said, I am going to randomly remember events and write about them now. They are in no particular order and are probably going to just sound scatterbrained... but I do so want to tell about them.

The month of January was full of fun. We went to our first Sumo tournament with our friends Rie and John. Our seats were great and it was interesting to learn all that we did about the matches that we were watching. There were lots of English pamphlets. I think that it has become a touristy event. Many of my Japanese friends have told me that they haven't ever gone to see a match. However, most of my gaijin com padre's have told me that if they haven't, they'd really like to. The matches themselves lasted only a short time, but the ceremonial things they did prior to fighting were really interesting. They threw salt into the ring to chase out bad spririts, the slapped their bellies and thighs, they squatted into fighting stance a certain way, and they walked into their corners to drink the holy water in the same manner. Everything was done in a very cerimonial way. The tournaments last 15 days, and we went to one of those 15 days. For each day of the tournament, there are matches from morning to night. We were only their for the mid level and high level sumo-san's. It was a fascinating experience. I hope that Jeremy and I have another chance at going.



Also in January, was Jeremy's birthday. On his actual Birthday, we went to an asian style Applebees-of-sorts restaurant called, The Monsoon Cafe. They have great food there and it's huge. Jeremy found his favorite beer, chang beer, and we had quite a few. What he wasn't expecting, was the whole restaurant to look at him and sing him Happy Birthday, while this giant dish of fruit got sat in front of him with candles poking out the top. It was a spendy Birthday surprise, but well worth the look on his face :o)

Then, to celebrate with our friends, we went out for karaoke. It was also our friend, Vicky's Birthday, so we celebrated together. It was fun. One of Vicky's young students gave her these Happy Birthday cake sunglasses, so they were passed around all night.



After karaoke, we went to an Irish pub called, Eurohouse, where we proceeded to drink the night and morning away. Here we are taking Tequila shots. It was also fun.



We also went to an ice bar with Lisa in hopes to find another cool place to hang out like the one we found in Hokkaido. Unfortunately, this place was no where near as cool, and was SOOO expensive!!! I wouldn't recomend wasting your money or time...
It was soooo tiny in there... but they did give us warm cloaks to wear. And a funky dog keychain.

Last of Hokkaido

Our last day in Sapporo was a bit uneventful. Aside from the hangovers we had, we were just exhausted. Our trip to Hokkaido was wonderfully jam packed from head to toe, and we were ready to go home. Noone wanted to decide what to do. We did, however, enjoy a few more bits of Sapporo before heading back to the airport.

This is a covered street which runs through Susukino, a very popular entertainment district. There are all kinds of things to do and see, and places to eat everywhere. It was a cool place. We went into an arcade, and a vintage clothing shop where a used ralph lauren knit sweater cost over 15,000 yen!!!! That's about $150 people!!! I couldn't believe it! Vinage and used apparently have different meanings here.


We decided we had to have one more round of Sapporo ramen before we left and decided the best place to do this would be at a place called Ramen Street. However, we were wrong. There were better places we could have gone, even the airport had better ramen.


But, I suppose the experience was cool. We walked down a street lined with po-dunk ramen shops. The guy that served our Ramen did so with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, which had been perched on his mouth during the cooking of this ramen. He was nice enough though.


Oishi ramen, Marta? We were tired, hungry, and a bit hungover (not to mention cold), so it tasted good all the same.


At the train station, on our way to the airport, I noticed these magazines in a convenience store window. You wouldn't believe the hype here about Obama. I can't imagine what it'd be like back home. The title here reads, Big Comic.

More of Sapporo

I really enjoy blogging on this website, however it's kind of a pain in the ass to put pictures on here. I am trying to figure out the easiest/fastest way of doing it. I thought this was going to be a faster method, but it still is taking too dang long. So, if any of you bloggers out there have some advice on adding pictures... please indulge me!

After we went through the beer museum, we saw that they were having a buffet (including beer) later that night, with crab!!!! So, after signing up for that, we went to this park. It's called Maruyama Koen and is a symbol of Sapporo. According to sightseeing pamphlet, this park features a virgin forest. I'm not exactly sure what that means.



The park was gorgeous! There was untouched snow everywhere. It was so bright! If it hadn't been so early in the day and we had much more to see and do, I would have made me some snow angels, or a snowman. But, it was so beautiful untouched.



Next, we went on a gondola ride up the side of Mt. Moiwa. It was just after sunset so as we rose up the side of the mountain, we were able to see an amazing view of the city, with the lights on. It was SOOOO cold, but I'm so glad we found it.


The city just went on and on. According to the recording as you ride up the elevator for TV tower, Sapporo is the fifth largest city in Japan.


After our trip up the mountain in the gondola, we made our way back to the Sapporo Beer Factory for a delicious meal of crab legs and sushi. We drank as much beer as we could stomach with our bellies already to max capacity.


Next, thanks to a referral from someone we met on the couchsurfing website, we found this random bar tucked away near the famous entertainment and restaurant area of Susukino. The owner is a 30 year transplant from California. (He's lived in Japan for 30 years, the transplant description is his own). Do you remember when I collected beer caps for so long back in college? This is something I would have liked to have done with all the caps... It was really cool.


The guy has over 300 different beers in his bar from all over the world. More importantly, he had all kinds of beer from OREGON!!!! Mostly Rogue brewery, but it was like a small piece of home tucked away in the streets of Hokkaido. I can confidently say that going to that bar was a favorite of all of us. We spent hours there.


Keep in mind that we started drinking when we went to the beer factory the first time, early in the afternoon. Then had our short break as we went up the mountain, to go back to the factory for dinner and more beer, to finishing it off with a cool guy from California, drinking microbrews.



The bar was covered in cans and bottles of different beers from years and years ago. Phred is definitely a packrat!!! But, it looked great in there.
Jeremy loved the Olympia wall hanging. His dad is a big fan of Oly... So, we had to take a few pictures to show Wade back home.


We had a great time!!!!