Can you get your oki on?

Hello everyone!

Yesterday was wonderful. I experienced part of downtown Tokyo with Rikkyo University students as my guide.  We, as a large group, went to a Christian church in the morning. Less than one percent of japan is christian and less than that regularly attend church. After the service,bethel students got to decide if they wanted to just have lunch with the Rikkyo students or go with some of them on adventures.  Well of course I wanted to go on adventures with Japanese girls on Tokyo!

We rode the trains about twenty minutes toward downtown. It was a little exciting to be without a professor on our second day, but the girls obviously knew what they were doing and it was fun to pave our own way.

We first went to a traditional Japanese restaurant followed by a karaoke club. I sang Poker Face by Lady Gaga with Nanako.  Apparently Gaga is famous worldwide! The highlight of the karaoke club was Caleb and Shane singing Mr Roboto. The Japanese girls found it hilarious. Two of the  girls sang American Idiot by Green Day which was pretty funny.

After karaoke we went to Sunshine City, which is a big indoor mall in Tokyo.  Some of the shops are the same, like  Gap, but the fashions are different. Japanese fashion is almost European--upscale skirts, tights and long boots, sort of what you see in the states except more so.

They have coldstones in japan! You know how if you tip coldstones workers in the states they sing a little?  Imagine really happy Japanese people dancing and singing and making ice creAm. :) :)

The sidewalks in japan are about four times wider than in the states and always full of people. Get this--I was in two different train stations, all over downtown tokyo, in malls, etc, and I never saw one other white person outside of our group. Nor black or anything besides Japanese. It was quite strange!

My writing is struggling a bit. Each morning I wake up early to journal about the previous day, but it ends up taking forever. I have written about twenty pages so far.  And I'm not allowing myself to write artistically or with detail because there's so much to say in plain speak.  Take this email for example. I don't even have the room to tell you about how Saeko laughed at the faces I tried to hide while eating the raw tofu that came with my fish. Or how it felt to finally be able to properly say thank you to the cashier at the bakery.  There are so many little and big details of each day...as you probably can tell by the length of these emails.


April