Day 1

Friday, August 3rd

You know when you go to sleep in a place that's not your bedroom and you wake up with a sort of startled "where the hell am I?!" sort of feeling? Well, the exact opposite happened to me. I woke up with a sense of belonging, with a sense of "this is right". Of course I also woke up at about 6am due to jet lag. I laid in bed for about an hour, listening to my host parents start their day. My host dad always leaves the house at about 7:10 and my host mom usually leaves around 7:30 except I found out that her work has moved her to part time so she leaves at about 8am now, so I was surprised to still see her around when I went downstairs at about 7:45. She had made Cha-han (Chinese fried rice) for breakfast and proceeded to tell me all about this really tasty iced coffee she bought and how I should make myself some but "damnit I can't remember where I put it". After a couple minutes of searching she found it though and I made myself some iced coffee (and it is pretty tasty). I forgot how much my host mom likes to talk. Miyuki (my host sister) always used to joke about how quite it is whenever my host mom isn't around and it's the truth. I enjoy it though. It's natsukashii (nostalgic) and i'm proud to be able to understand 90% of what's she saying (pretty good for someone who hasn't used Japanese in a year and a half).

At about 11:00am I decide to head out with no real plan in mind. I take the residential train (the one that stops at all stops, thus taking a good 20 minutes to get to Ikebukuro (the final stop)) because it's less crowded and I have time. A little girl and her mother sat across from me and the little girl kept up a steady pace of conversation for the whole ride, with her mother throwing in half-hearted little side comments here and there. I ended up on the Yamanote line and decided to head to Waseda. It's summer break so I wasn't expecting to find anyone there so I just meandered around the campus.

For as much as I did not like Waseda, it was nice to go back on my own time (if you want to know how much I didn't like Waseda and why, you'll have to go back through this blog because i'm sure I posted plenty about how I felt at the time). I decided to see if our OUS (Oregon University System) coordinator was in her office and low and behold she was! 

Marie Sato and moi

She's a lovely lady and was always very helpful. Her little girl was with her (and took this picture for us) because she has the mumps (which I'm pretty sure I got vaccinated for...I feel fine anyways). She was super excited to see me because she thought I wasn't coming until later in the month (I had emailed her before I came asking to see her but she said she might not be in the office in August so I was super excited to see her as well). We talked for about an hour about everything (a surprising thing I found out is that she gets paid in USD because she's not a Waseda employee but rather an OUS employee so she's been feeling America's economic crises quite personally). She asked me if I had any plans for the rest of the day and I said no, but I was wondering how to get to Yoyogi park because I had never been there before (don't ask me why, I just haven't). She gave me directions and informed me about some fire work festivals that were happening next week that I will probably check, out and we parted ways. 

I had lunch at Starbucks because I wanted to test out their Wifi on my phone but it failed. I don't know why I can't access it, but I can't. So there goes that idea. 

Yoyogi park is sort of like how central park is the New York (right?). You can access it easily from Harajuku station, and there's even a shrine dedicated to Emperor Meiji which was pretty rad to check out. 

forever alone....

That's a lot of Sake

Apparently the Empress liked to fish in this pond

I can't remember what was special about this well
but it was infested with mosquitoes so I bailed pretty quickly.

 

 The park was pretty empty save for a couple of Chinese tour groups. After wondering the park for about two hours I walked about Harajuku (which is the equivalent of walking through shopping hell). There was some musician playing on the street who appeared to be making a music video and I stopped and watched for a little bit but I couldn't make out who it was so I got bored and walked away. 

All in all it was a good first day. 

Day two will debut Tokyo Sky Tree. 

Jamie