hi all,
I ran into one of the former ALTs still living in the guesthouse, and she said she was going to a festival and asked if I wanted to come along, so I quickly ate my lunch and went. There was a wandering brass band, some comedians, several different pantomime acts, a Cirque de Soleile type act, and some incredibly flexible Chinese gymnasts. The festival was in Koenji (高円寺)、which is near Shinjuku station.
We got to go to a couple different shows, and I really wish I had brought my camera. On the way back, I picked up some brochures from the train station about different places to see and also stopped in Akihabara. This is the electronics district in Tokyo: if it needs electricity to work, or is somehow related to electronic products, you will find it here. There are dozens of video game shops, DVD/CD shops, some weird adult shops (weird as in they advertise by sending these women dressed as French maids out onto the street to distribute flyers for the store), tons of computer shops, cellphone stores, and several Best Buy style orgies of electronic gadetry.
I stopped by one of the smaller smorgesborg shops to pick up a USB stick, and then went to a game store to pick up a copy of a game featuring Miyamoto Musashi. It was released seveal years ago, but hasn't been released outside of Japan yet, so I wasn't sure if it would work on my American PS3. It does in fact work, but the entire interface, dialoge, etc is in Japanese, so I'll need to study quite a bit more before I can actually play it. Still, from what I got to do, it seems like a really fun game.
Tomorrow is Green Day, which for me means that I get free admission to Ueno Zoo. A bunch of people went to that park and zoo during hanami, and several ALTs seem to think that I haven't been getting out enough, so I'm going there and maybe to Asakusa, which is near the zoo. There are some large, famous temples there. Tomorrow, I'll have my camera with me, so I'll have more pictures up as well.
Next weekend, I might try to go to Nikko. It is about 2 hours to the North by local train, but half that (and twice more expensive) by shinkansen. I've seen some pictures and read about it a little, and its definitely somewhere I want to see.
Cheers
