Asakusa

Today I went to Asakusa with Emily, Lufi and Ami. It was a lot of fun. Asakusa has a big shrine and a lot of touristy shopping, but surprisingly it wasn't very crowded. I'd been there before, with Ms. Park, but it was much nicer to see it while not jetlagged and or in a hurry. We had to take trains on both train systems, so that was excitingish. The tourist information center had some useful information and I got a couple booklets in English. We got mochis on sticks right when we got there - I got one that had three on the stick and were covered with a caramelized soy sauce. It tastes really good, even if it sounds a bit odd. We shopped and looked at stuff along the bazaar. I got new Hello Kittys for my phone. I'll have to put up a photo of them soon. Then we saw some women who may have been geishas - they were dressed like it, with the white faces and everything. I took a few pictures of them (but I am having trouble getting the photos to go in the order I want them to be, so I will put them up later if I remember).

We did this purifing thing with water - there's a big round water fountain thing with ladles and you sort of wash your hands with the ladle by pouring water on them and then you put some water in your hands and rinse your mouth out and spit the water into this trough on the floor. Supposedly it does the same thing as going to Confession and was much less stressful than telling a priest about all the bad things you have done. We went to the main shrine place, and there were a lot of people praying or looking around or getting fortunes . I didn't get a fortune because the last time I didn't get a good one. But we did take some photos under a big red latern thing - the first one is me, Lufi and Emily and the second one is me and Ami.

We wanted to go to the plastic food district, Kappabashi, so we walked in the general direction of it and saw some teenagers dressed very oddly... I took a picture and then one of them yelled at us to not take photos of them. Ami was like, are you going to erase the picture you took of them and both Emily and I were like, no way. They shouldn't dress weirdly if they don't want people looking at them. The path we were walking down had a lot of food booths and I got a crepe with chocolate sauce and almond slivers and sprinkles. It was extremely good - the crepe dough part was really good tasting . Ami got tacoyaki (octopus in dough in a ball) but they were too hot for her to eat right away. Lufi got a chocolate covered banana on a stick and Emily got karage, which is fried chicken with some sort of sauce.

After all that eating, we finally got to Kappabashi but only two stores were open. It was really quiet walking there, almost no people were walking and all the stores had their metal gates down. The plastic food we saw looked very real.

We went back to the main gate and Ami decided to get a present for her tutor, so we split up for about 15 minutes - I had seen a good present right near the beginning of the shopping so I went back for it and Emily went to a Starbucks to go to the bathroom. Three groups of young people came up to me and asked me if I spoke English when I was walking around by myself. The first one I said no, but the second two I just sort of looked at and shook my head. Emily was back to the meeting spot and we were sitting on this fence intended to keep the people onthe sidewalk and I had beentelling her about all these people asking me that, and two guys came up to us and asked if they could ask us some questions about Japan... and we couldn't say that we didn't speak English because we had been talking when they came up to us. It was kind of weird because they were asking us like what we like about Japan and really lame questions and then when Ami and Lufi got there they started talking too and eventually (okay, about ten minutes later) the sunwent behind the building and it got cold so we were able to leave. I guess Japanese people seem to think it is okay to come up to foreigners and talk to them. And Emily says it never happens to her unless she's with me. So maybe Japanese people think it's okay to come up to blatantly caucasian people. I have started saying nein instead of no (or answering in Japanese) when I don't want to talk to people because german is far less common a language. I mean, it's not like I have a sign around my neck inviting people to talk to me. As we were walking to the train Ami said that people are always so interested to talk to her (she is from Bali) because many Japanese people go there on vacation. It's just weird. And it's never like they do it in a threatening manner, it's just that they want to talk to white people.

After we got back to Inage we went to a photo booth across from the station and took some of those little pictures, which was pretty entertaining. I came home and buttered and toasted an onion bagel. The butter made it get a little darker than I was expecting, but it was really good. I'm still getting the hang of my toaster oven after three toastings.