tokyo

this holiday season i went to tokyo to visit cj. it was a blast! spent a lot of time wandering the streets of tokyo exploring all the unique towns. i ended up walking through daikanyama - the cool boutique store trendy area, shibuya - the flashy trendy area, ebisu, asakusa - the old geisha town, and a bunch of other places. cj, his friend, and i also biked westward from his place in the city until we hit the hills. pretty nice ride ~35mi. the worst part was putting our bikes in trash bags (rules...) to take on the train then having people yell at us for assembling our bikes too soon. sigh. i guess it'd be trouble if everyone decided to bring their bikes on the train. i had my first conveyor belt sushi, which is awesome! i love the fact that it's cheap and i have so much power over what and how much i eat. we also ate lots of mochi ice creams and ramen.

other highlights of the trip included getting dressed up and going to a nice french restaurant in which we found a sleeping man slumped in the corner. one person in our party was really worked up about this and we had to hold her back from throwing bread at the man. afterwards i put CJ's pants and shoes on for the walk home, and subsequently got propositioned by a female prostitute. if only i had accepted.

we also traveled out to the suburbs to see a couple school friends who also happen to be in the city. there i experienced first hand the tininess of a porsche as we tried to fit 5 ppl in a 4 seater. squish!

a trip to tokyo is not complete without visiting one of the three ikeas in the tokyo area. we spent a long day there along with thousands of other people. but it was not fruitless. we ended up with a nice dining room table and swedish meatballs.

christmas is like valentine's day in japan, but we spent it at a big potluck dinner party. new years eve we spent with a couple of his friends. one of them wanted to go to the meiji shrine where people can line up to ring the big bell. unfortunately, millions of people go. we managed to convince him that karaoke would be much more fun. mmm karaoke with all you can drink beer. we were definitely the loudest out of everyone there. the good times included 99 red balloons in the deutsche.

all in all, a good trip

pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/angela.tong/TokyoWinter2009#