Edo-Tokyo Museum

Today marks the start of our lovely five day weekend. The weather is gorgeous today (mid 70's and sunny), but tomorrow it's supposed to rain... a typhoon again, I think. Or not, I can't tell.

Scott and Emily and I went to the Edo-Tokyo Museum. It looked gargantuan, but once we were inside, there wasn't nearly as much to look at as the size of the building would have made you think. They had a sign in English for pretty much everything, but there was definately far more information in the Japanese versions. It had a bridge that was a replica of an important bridge from a long time ago, and miniature versions of some important buildings and stuff and some artifacts, but it was definately a museum aimed at school groups - and it was crawling with middleschoolers. A lot of whom thought it was amusing to say hello to me in English. I answered a couple times, and then even more of them would say hello. It was kind of weird. The museum only took about an hour and a half to see everything - it was laid out chronologically, starting from Edo and working towards modern Tokyo, with the 1923 Kanto earthquake, World War II and a brief display on the 1964 Olympics. I took many pictures of both the signs and some of the artifacts.

The museum building itself was very futuristic - there was this crazy "plateauing escalator" (Scott called it that) in a plastic tunnel to get from the ticket booth to the actual entranceof the museum, kind of like at some movie theaters in that regard.

Afterwards, we took the train back to Nishi-Chiba to the school for the festival. Near where we came in it was fine, we saw a guy riding a bicycle pulling a Thomas the Tank Engine float and a big thing we thought was a light blue penguin, but it had a very small green umbrella with shell lines on it, so it may have been some sort of freakish turtle. The rest of it was kind of weird... there was a big stage with someguy twirling a flaming stick around, but then some girl dressed like Alice in Wonderland came out and we kept walking and looking at food... it was uncomfortable because the kids were yelling a lot and it felt like they were yelling especially loudly at us... some people tried to talk english to us and Emily told them we didn't speak english.

I ended up getting a taco type thing, whichwas more like a burrito but was on a real tortilla and everything. And I got a red bean crepe, which had red bean paste in it and whip cream and some green tea flavored powder sprinkled around. It was really good.

Then we walked back to the dorm and Emily got her papers and we walked to the Ward Office to pick up our foreign resident cards, which was really easy, we just handed in a form and the lady gave us our cards. It's holography. We were leaving and decided to walk through this little park that looked like it parallelled the main road... but after the park, we ended up on a street and kept walking, thinking there would be a cross street,but there never was. So prettymuch we ended up going in a triangle (I really need to figure out how to make a map on here) to get back. Tonight is half price day at Pizza Hut so we are goingto go and get pizza... except I think they will be smaller than we hope. Oh well. At least the crust looks thicker than a pita.