Noodlelastic Tokyo

Noodlelastic Move

2008-07-25T02:43:00.002+09:00

Hi Mom,

Thank you for reading my blog for these two great years in Tokyo. As you probably know, the Noodlelastic family has moved to the USA.

We're so sad to leave our loved ones in Tokyo and the beautiful, inspiring country of Japan. But we're also excited about what's next for us.

We will start a new blog soon where you can check out the adventures we're having, adjusting to things like giant cokes, tipping, and driving a car again (woah!).

Love,
Noodle

Mmmmmm

2008-04-14T14:55:00.002+09:00

I posted about all the delicious food we tried in Hong Kong, so here's a post to make my kitchen at home feel more loved.

These are our two favorite dinners to prepare in Tokyo: broiled salmon with rice & salad, and yakisoba with tofu! yum....

Captain of the Enterprise to boldly hand out degrees

2008-02-29T14:28:00.006+09:00

When we were in Hong Kong, the South China Morning Post was delivered to the hotel room every morning. On Tuesday, January 8, the City section featured the following headline:

Captain of the Enterprise to boldly hand out degrees

Hilarious and enticing, surely this is newspaper writing at its peak. I adore all things Star Trek and chief among them, all things Picard. As it turns out, the article was a brief but entertaining society-page blurb about Patrick Stewart's visit to Hong Kong, where he would hand out degrees in a local graduation ceremony.

I brought the paper back home, where I clipped it, ironed it, and framed it. Now as I work on my thesis I can feel inspired by the fantasy of Captain Picard showing up at the ceremony and calling me "Doctor." Aaaahhhhhhhh....

Click here to send a Patrick Steward postcard to a friend, courtesy of the fan club Patrick Stewart Network

Finishing Video

2008-02-26T14:35:00.005+09:00

You can see me cross the finish line at this website:
http://www.ntv.co.jp/tokyomarathon/goalmovie/

Most of the web page is in Japanese, but it's easy to watch the video:

1) Look for a box labeled "SEARCH" and enter my bib number there (email me for the number).

2) Two buttons labeled "PLAY" will appear. Click the "PLAY" button on the RIGHT.

Each button corresponds to a different finishing gate, left or right. When you click "PLAY", a video will appear under the right-hand gate. Watch carefully and you'll see me arrive, about 10 seconds after the movie starts.

I come in on the far left of the frame. I'm wearing a gray jacket with a red stripe, and a thick gray headband, kind of bandana-style. Doesn't stand out much, but a friend of mine who showed me the video said "there were two foreign ladies, and I thought maybe this one was you". Right on!

They create these videos using our finishing times. There is an official recording of the time when I crossed the finish line, which they get using a microchip tied to my shoe. When you enter my bib number on the website, they just pull up the video corresponding to a 30-second window around my finish time. And voila! I will appear running through the right-hand gate.

Tokyo Marathon

2008-02-26T13:35:00.006+09:00

My sweet reward- a finisher's medal! (That's a breathe-right strip on my nose.)

The day of the Tokyo Marathon finally came on Sunday February 17th! We had a really good time, the weather was perfect and the crowds were unbelievable, I guess that's part of the experience here in Tokyo.

My time was an unremarkable 4:54:07. I did a little too much sightseeing in the first 5K, picked up speed between 10K-30K, and hit a wall around 38-40K. But I think I can improve on that next time around (Fall marathon, anybody?).

Some things about the race were remarkable - everything was very well organized. They had timing gates every 5K that recorded our splits and displayed them in real time on the web, in both regular and mobile-phone-browser formats!

My husband and I planned a series of cheering spots along the route, and after he dropped me off at the start line, he continued along the race course using the subway. Thanks to the live updates on the website, he could easily see where I was in the race and whether I had already passed by his current location. Even my mom tracked my progress from North Carolina, although she had to go to bed before the end of the race since it was midnight, NC time (Scottie, if you're reading this: "Stop! Nevada time...").

At the end of the race I received a finisher's medal - yay! I also got a free bottle of a mysterious product called "Air Salonpass". Directly behind the guys handing out the bottles was a large seating area, where runners plopped down, opened their samples, and sprayed every possible body part with Air Salonpass. Turns out it is a cooling muscle balm - aaaaahhhhhh, that was nice.

Tokyo Big Sight was just big enough for the marathon finish. Post-race, I picked up my race bag and headed through a series of changing rooms/halls out to the entrance of the convention center. My husband was there, waiting for me to victoriously emerge! We made our way home sloooooowly, since at that point my ability to walk was fading away thanks to fatigue plus cold temperatures. But after a couple of days' rest I was good as new and the medal is now enjoying a prominent position in the foyer, next to our collection of cute-neice-and-nephew photos.

Tokyo Bloopers II

2008-02-14T12:24:00.003+09:00

Many of the funny mistakes I've made have to do with eating something that packed a punch or surprise. Like the seemingly harmless "okra" sushi. It really was okra, but it was crammed so full of the stuff that I was chewing for the next 20 minutes while toro, salmon, hamachi, mirugai, and other yummy things were served to and downed by my dining partners.

I also make a lot of mistakes at the grocery store. Even something simple like buying a bag of rice becomes complicated when you have severely limited reading skills. I can decipher a lot of things that are written on labels, but only after I've brought the thing home, prepared it, seen the look on my husband's face when he eats it, and then spent an hour scouring the label for something that explains the look. The answer: it was diet rice. After looking more carefully I found that "Calorie off!" is happily proclaimed in pink on the front of the bag.

Similarly, readers of hiragana will spot something interesting about this box of tissue:

In a land where the toilet paper gives off a faint scent of roses, I was still surprised when I pulled a kleenex from this box and felt a tingling/burning sensation in my nose. Upon closer inspection, I found the word "Menthol" clearly written in gold, right under "Lotion Tissue".

Tokyo Bloopers

2008-02-14T11:24:00.004+09:00

I haven't really shared enough of the silly, silly things that we've done since we came here. I'm talking about foreigner bloopers - mistakes we've made because we can't or aren't patient enough to understand things. Well here is one to get us started, and I'm sure there will be plenty more.

Like the time when two ladies from Australia stopped us in the subway and asked us how to buy a ticket. They were a sweet old pair of retired teachers, and sisters. We were so excited about our role as helpful local experts that we walked them over to the ticket machine and suggested they could buy two each - one for the trip across town, and one for the way back, since we wouldn't be there to help again.

Hah! People who are familiar with the Tokyo metro may already be laughing at this time. What they know, and what we didn't know although we pretended to know it and freely mis-informed others as well, is this: the single-ride ticket is not a free pass to go a certain number of stops. It is a ticket from station x to station y, and these are printed right there on the ticket.

We discovered this when we foolishly tried taking our own advice. I bought two tickets on the way into the metro and so did my husband. On the way back we breezed past the ticket machine with our "return" tickets and stuck them into the automatic gate on the way to the platform. The gates quickly shut in my expertly astonished face, as red lights started flashing and a siren went off. At this time I looked, really looked, at my ticket (which had been spewed back out at me by the machine, apparently in disgust). Sure enough, the ticket plainly stated that it was valid for one ride from the station where I bought it to the station where I was standing at that moment. Very helpful in case I wanted to jog across town and ride the metro back. At the time, not helpful at all.

The flashing lights and the siren may seem appalling but I'm quite used to it by now, having set them off many times before and since, and not just in the metro (the bathrooms have their own lights and their own sirens). More shameful to me was the thought that this same thing was happening, or was going to happen soon, somewhere far across town, to those two old ladies who had clung to my pale face and native accent like a life raft, only to find it leaks.

Well the old ladies were no doubt stopped by the metro gates, as well, and then by the metro guard who is always nearby, and then let through anyway since the guard is usually polite and has dealt with lost foreigners before.

Personally I learned that not "helping" people anymore is really the kindest favor I can do for them.

Jeanne D'Arc - Love this game!

2008-02-07T17:23:00.000+09:00

Like many computer-science types I love video games. I got a new one for Christmas and now I'm so addicted that I have to ration myself - I'm allowed 1 hour per day max. It's the only way I can keep myself from being stuck on the couch, frantically pressing buttons like they were self-administered drugs. I mean that in the best way!

It's called Jeanne D'Arc. The official website is on the Sony Playstation site, and there's also a review on gamespot.

Here's a screenshot from gamespot:

Most of the structure of the game is a clone of Final Fantasy, but the battles have something really neat. You can see there's kind of a grid, like a chessboard, on the screenshot there - players have to move around the board in order to get into a position to attack an enemey. Okay so it's no chess, but it does add a whole layer of strategy that makes the battles way more interesting than the usual, static, player-selects-move/card/attack, opponent-selects-move/card/attack, repeat ad nauseum.

The plot in Jeanne D'Arc is magical, entertaining, and totally wack. Yes, I'm showing both my age and un-coolnes by using such outdated slang but that's the best word for it. The real, historical Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. In this game the main protagonist is Joan of Arc (and it's even more fun to call her "Jeanne" with a crusty French accent!). So I saw early on that this would be either an unwinnable game with a very sad ending, or a game which takes *lots* of creative license. Turns out to be the latter, and how. You have a whole team of characters who come, go, die, rise from the dead, turn into monsters, turn back into humans, and pretty much everything else you can think of but could not possibly predict while playing the game. As a result you spend a lot of time leveling up characters only to have them "leave your ranks". But don't worry, they'll be back, and when you least expect it, too.

I'm just nearing the end of the game now, and already I'm wondering - after I finish, what will I do with that hour-long spot in the day when I will surely be missing my Jeanne D'Arc. Hmmm... finish the thesis, maybe?

Hong Kong Hooray

2008-01-15T11:09:00.002+09:00

We visited Hong Kong last month and I didn't get around to posting about it until now. It was right after Christmas break, and we had about 5 days in between returning from LA and heading off again to Hong Kong. It was kind of frantic, but we had a lot of fun and saw (and ate!) some amazing things.

The night before departure we picked up the Lonely Planet Encounter Guide, which was really handy and helped us get the most out of our visit:

We ate like kings while we were there. We started with some barbecue pork from a fast-food place at the airport, and we ordered wild mushroom soup and fried rice from room service before crashing on the first night. The next day we went to a Northern Chinese restaurant where we were served roasted eggplant in a spicy red sauce and an entire fish that had been lightly deep-fried and arranged into a kind of free-standing tabletop sculpture, head and all, on a platter with sticky, sweet brown sauce.

Later in the week we squeezed in a drink at the Peninsula Hotel and tried the Indian buffet at Gaylord, a place recommended by the book. They had a really enjoyable live trio playing traditional music. And we ended the trip with spicy samosa appetizers, creamy pumpkin soup, and soft-shell crab fried rice at Cafe Deco on the Peak.

I was impressed by the beautiful landscape all around the city, although the air quality is a real problem. I would love to go back someday and check out the hiking trails in the mountainous parks surrounding the city.

I'm the running world's something or other

2007-12-13T00:39:00.000+09:00

I ran my second "pace" run today and it went really well. I was nervous about it beforehand because this type of running is different from what I usually do: instead of really far at a snail's pace, it was kinda far, and kinda fast.

So I felt totally awesome when I made my time! Seven miles in one hour, two minutes, fifty-four seconds. I was happy to see that the Running Calculator provided by the Cleveland Clinic shares my enthusiasm. When I typed in my numbers to find out how many calories I burned on my run, the calculator had this comment:

Can you read that? It says "You're the running world's Lance Armstrong!"

Haha. Such an exaggeration but hey, I'll take what I can get. I guess they felt it was more inspirational than "You're the running world's average 30-year-old!", which would be more accurate. Or they could have gone with "You're the running world's you!", which has a comforting self-help ring to it, but which fails to really impress.

Just for fun, I started typing in a bunch of numbers. At 6 miles I get "Now that's what I'm talkin' about!" and for anything over 8 miles I get "Woah...The pavement's starting to melt!" Turns out I'm only Lance Armstrong between miles 7 and 8, which is a relief. Sure, it felt glamorous at first, but after a while the pressure of being a celebrity athlete wears you down.

Merry Merry

2007-12-11T00:30:00.000+09:00

It's Holiday time again and I'm trying to get into the spirit, but this is probably the one time of year when everything in Japan seems the most foreign and different from what I expect. So I really feel this video by the Killers - there's something Christmas-like about it, but there's something that's a little off. And this time in a good way.

Pacing Ourselves

2007-11-25T20:28:00.000+09:00

I've been sticking to the training schedule for 6 weeks now, and it's going pretty well. Today I decided to inflict it I mean share it with my husband! We rode the subway over to Tokyo Station, which is really amazing in itself. It's huge and completely overwhelming when you're inside trying to find a train, but on the outside there is one exit with a facade that dates back to 1914. Here it is, currently under renovation:

For a much prettier picture, click here.

From the train station, we walked over to the Imperial Palace, which is a really popular place for both strolling and jogging. The palace grounds are surrounded by a moat where ducks, koi, and even giant swans like to float around. On the outside of the moat is a wide sidewalk that goes in an uninterrupted loop for about 5K. I ran two laps and tacked on a little extra to make it 6.4 miles, total.

It was a perfect day for running and there were lots of people out there enjoying it with us: girls, guys, and couples all working out in various layers of highly technical running gear. And for me it was a nice change since I don't often see other runners on my routes. Tourists? Check. Car enthusiasts? Check. And old Japanese guys dressed as 50's gang members while throwing a makeshift dance party? Check! But runners? Not so much.

Afterwards we stopped at Dean & Deluca in Marunouchi for a delicious grilled chicken sandwich to go. Yum!

It's gotta be the shoes

2007-11-10T10:44:00.000+09:00

Over my last 15 or so years of running, I've done most of it in Asics shoes. The 2130 shown above will probably be my next pair. I used to buy the 1100 series (1110, 1120). I tried the 2110s two years ago because I couldn't even find a pair of 1120s at that time in Pittsburgh. The selection over there is surprisingly sparse, even at running stores, where they fill up the shelves by displaying the same 3 shoes over and over again.

Eventually I just gave up and bought a pair of whatever they were pushing at the time - in this case some nondistinguished style of Nike Shox (maybe Saikano?). But it's time to replace them again, and that means shopping for sportswear in Tokyo.

To put this experience in perspective, keep in mind that in Tokyo we're crazy about hobbies and everything related to hobbies. Most of the time, participating in a sport is more than just training, teamwork, effort, or achievement - it's an opportunity to buy "gear". I've seen it on the ski/snowboard hills, where everybody out there is dressed like they've got an endorsement of some kind. But watch out, only a few have actually skied before. As a result of this mentality, there are plenty of specialty stores packed with flashy stuff for you to use - or just show off with - while you train.

One problem for me is finding out where these stores are, exactly. We started with this list from the Namban Rango running club. But because it was compiled in 2002, the "list" is really more of a cryptic, historical clue. We followed the directions to ART Sports Okachimachi, only to find that they now sell only camping equipment. Fortunately, in addition to being cleverly hidden, Tokyo shops are also clustered according to purpose. So by traversing from the camp store to a nearby climbing store, and eventually to an all-things-outdoor store, we eventually got directions to the displaced running store.

View Larger Map

Down an alley and around a corner, behind the JR Okachimachi train station, we found a tiny doorway leading to 4 floors' worth of every kind of running device, tool, supply, accessory, or clothing you could want. That is, assuming that you don't want shoes bigger than women's 7.5, which I'm told they don't carry in Japan. So at the end of this marathon of shopping, I will probably run the actual marathon in shoes that come from roadrunnersports.com.

Boston's all right

2007-11-01T15:47:00.000+09:00

We went to Boston a couple of weeks ago, on our way back to Pittsburgh for some status meetings with my thesis committee. In Boston I got a chance to meet up with my little sister - yay! We took a walk around so she could show me some cool sites like these:

The bar where she drinks after work (dangerous places- it was in just such an establishment that we both decided to get tattoos, back in 2001):

The "Old North Church" of Paul Revere's Ride:

And a nice Boston-y mix of old and new buildings at dusk:

She also took me to the incredible flour bakery where we tried one of every kind of cookie. It was amazing!

I really liked Boston, even in the cold rain. So I was happy to be flipping through the channels back in Tokyo and see the final game of the
World Series being shown live! I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, given the absolutely crazy amount of media coverage they had here about Daisuke Matsuzaka joining the Boston Red Sox.

What did surprise me was the coverage strategy adopted by the Tokyo broadcasters. The game looked like a blowout until the eighth inning, when Colorado scored two runs and came within one of tying the game. At this point Boston replaced Japanese pitcher Hideki Okajima with an American guy. I'm no baseball fan, but I was into it enough to wonder whether Colorado would actually build some momentum and tie or even win a game. It was just at this moment when the station decided to stop broadcasting the World Series and return to the usual daytime soaps instead.

I'm not kidding! They broadcast eight innings - and baseball games only go to nine - but apparently once Okajima was taken out the whole thing became unwatchable to Tokyo audiences. Fortunately I already use www.sportsline.com for live scoreboards in all kinds of sports. So I got to kind-of watch the end of the game and send my sister an excited go-Boston! email afterwards.

And that's how I learned an interesting lesson about baseball:

It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the Japanese pitchers.

Tokyo Marathon

2007-10-08T17:41:00.000+09:00

Back in June I entered the registration lottery for the Tokyo Marathon.
There is a limit of 50,000 runners for this race, and the first 25,000 to register get a guaranteed spot. After these spots are filled, anyone registering on the website is entered into a lottery. At the end of the registration period, another 25,000 runners are chosen randomly from these registrants. The notifications were supposed to go out by email last week.

As a grad student, I've gone through this kind of thing a lot: these days, to submit a paper for publication in a conference or journal, you usually send the thing away electronically and then wait for weeks or months while someone decides whether or not the work is appropriate for their venue.

If you end up pulling one or more all-nighters trying to finish your draft, it's easy to put the waiting process out of your mind for a while: for the first 24 hours you're asleep. But after some time you start thinking about and looking for the verdict. The closer it gets to the time when you expect an answer, the more you think and the more you look.

Finally you get an email, either with good news ("We are pleased to inform you...") or with bad news ("We regret to inform you...").

With all of that in the back of my mind, this past Friday I saw this in my inbox:

Sender	Subject
tokyomarathon2008	TOKYO MARATHON 2008

After 6 years of graduate school I have a conditioned response to messages like these. My heart races as I try to simultaneously click and not-click on the email. Mentally, I enter a multiple-universes kind of state where I can peek into the future and see a "Congratulations!", while another future-me is reading the disheartening words "many fine applicants". It's a confusing time.

Anyway what I actually saw was this:

Dear Sir or Madam

Congratulations! You have been selected to run the 2008 Tokyo marathon.

So now, putting all of my imagined value-judgements aside (this was a lottery, after all, and not an application): is this good news or bad news?

In 2002, I ran the Pittsburgh Marathon, which unfortunately was suspended in 2004 and hasn't come back. Since then I've run here and there, but lately I've only been running 10 miles per week, at most.

I'm also very busy with work right now. Hal Higdon does not recommend that runners train for the marathon while "studying for a law exam or planning a wedding". Does "finishing a Ph.D." also count? Probably.

So maybe this is not the best time for the marathon. On one hand, this is an opportunity for me to do something uniquely Tokyo, while I'm here. On the other, there are many fun and beautiful marathons to be run around the world, maybe next year.

By the 26th of this month, I have to email the marathon organizers to tell them whether I'll be accepting my spot. I'm thinking of something like this:

Dear Sir or Madam,

Thank you for your offer, unfortunately my quota for exciting but stressful and ultimately unrealistic goals has been reached for this semester/year/life. There were many fine applicants and believe me I took on more of them than I could possibly accomplish with any grace...

Or who knows, maybe like this:

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am pleased to inform you that I will be running in the marathon this Spring. I look forward to the physical exhaustion as a way to balance and hopefully manage the intellectual stresses that come with finishing a doctoral thesis. It also seems like a golden opportunity for me to participate in Tokyo cultural life without having to use any of my unique and embarrassing pronunciations of Japanese words...

Bagslide

2007-07-16T13:57:00.000+09:00

When we go shopping in Tokyo, we always come home with a fine paper bag. A cute, colorful bag that we shove into a small, dark cabinet as soon as we get it home and start putting its contents to good use. The bags are usually so attractive and neatly constructed that I can't bear to shred them down to a size that actually fits into our little trash can.

I was pretty happy with this buy-and-shove arrangement until yesterday, when I tried cramming the bag that broke the camel's back into the cabinet. The whole pile flooded out in a crazy, colorful paper-bag-slide.

The first thing I noticed: Boy, I must really love Starbucks. There were no fewer than 23 Starbucks bags in there, representing the full spectrum of seasonal Starbucks advertising campaigns here in Tokyo. The second: Those bags are so darn cute.

Here are some pictures of my favorite ones. Their companions have been collected and stowed into a new, more secure holding pen - a really big paper bag.

This one is uniqe. The Spring Starbucks bag features Azuki Frappuccino (Some people really like it, some people really don't). It seems to be exclusive to East Asia. Count: 1

This is the most common - standard Starbucks bag. Count: 14

The Fall Starbucks bag. Count: 4

Christmas Starbucks, Count: 4

Following the seasonal theme, here is a cute Christmas bag from Sony Plaza.

This one is for Valentine's Day. Level 4 Hot Pink!

This is my favorite. It's chock-full of Halloween details: a pumpkin on one side, a ghost on the other, and bats printed on the interior. Boo!

Sightseeing from home

2006-11-13T01:02:00.000+09:00

A couple of weeks ago, a friend at work told us that on a clear day the apartments on Odaiba have a view of Mount Fuji. Every day since then I've been looking out our window in the morning just to check. Today it finally happened: the weather was beautiful and the usual morning haze had blown out with last night's storm. There were incredible clouds over the bay and in the background you could see the mountains very clearly.

Payoff

2006-10-20T12:38:00.000+09:00

Our first week of Japanese class has been a great although difficult success. Last Thursday we woke up at 6:30am to make it to our first class with Yamazaki-sensei. Class starts at 9:30am and being on time means arriving at 9:15. Half the students had semester orientation that day so class ended early. We only had time to introduce ourselves and go over the essentials: "Excuse me", "I'm sorry", and "I'm very sorry".

Our second class was on Monday. By this time we were feeling daring and we slept in until 7:15, but we paid for it when we had to rush out of the house in a frenzy. Fortunately our Monday teacher is Kaneko-sensei, and he was late! But once he got started it was a great class. Kaneko has a gift for hand-puppetry which he demonstrated generously. We had the full three hours and there were a lot of fun games and role-play. We took turns choosing pens from a tote bag and asking the class: "Whose pen?" "That's my pen, thank you." "You're welcome."

All of this paid off yesterday, when I participated in a group meeting at my husband's department in the University. A local student gave a 1-hour technical presentation followed by what appeared to be a vibrant discussion, all in Japanese. Afterward the department chair asked whether I wasn't bored. I was happy to report that I'm already spotting words I learned from my language class -- I was able to catch about 50 uses of the word "sono", meaning "that".

We're Back

2006-10-12T07:19:00.000+09:00

We returned to the States on the 18th of September to take care of the last few moving tasks, and it turned into a month-long trip. But we arrived back in our new hometown of Tokyo last Sunday and we have our first Japanese Language class today at 9:30am. We had one of those foreigner moments when registering (What did that administrator say? Does that mean maybe, or no? But she said okay! Is this rude? aaaaahhh!). So hopefully the first class will go a little smoother...

Useful ATM

2006-09-10T14:02:00.000+09:00

We tried a few ATMs in Odaiba and Roppongi, and so far this one is the only one that accepted our US-issued Visa bank card. This particular one is on the 1st floor of Aqua City, but other machines from the same bank are probably just as good.

Views on the weekend

2006-09-10T13:55:00.000+09:00

This is the lovely view of boats parked outside Decks shopping mall, near our apartment. They show up just after sunset, in the little bay beside the man-made beach. It fills in the view of Rainbow Bridge very nicely. Apparently it's a widely appreciated sight: the park fills up with couples on walks around the same time as the boats arrive.

Laundry

2006-09-10T13:51:00.000+09:00

I learned yesterday why an ironing board and an iron are basic appliances provided at the dorms: shirts come out of the dryer looking like this.

Garbage Island

2006-09-08T17:33:00.000+09:00

Yesterday we went to yet another office to get re-entry permission (follow-up to the Alien Registration). This office is located on the isle of garbage. Apparently a lot of garbage is sorted and stored there, along with us foreigners, haha! It lies just across an inlet from the dormitory, but we still had to take two trains to get there. My advice: definitely take a taxi from Rinkai Line Tennozu Isle station to the Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau building. It's a pretty cheap ride. Otherwise you will be treating yourself to a long walk (25 min.) through a fragrant part of town.

Alien Registration

2006-09-06T10:31:00.000+09:00

As a foreigner, you need an Alien Registration Card to get a cell phone in Tokyo (or a bank account). But registration takes 3 weeks. So you can also ask for a registration certificate that says your registration is pending, and use that instead. We went to the Koto City Office to get a ceritificate for Kenji, and his card was ready -- 10 days early! That's a big relief, since a work visa is single-entry and doesn't allow you to leave the country until you're registered. Now we can make our trip to the US later this month.

Tokyo Disney

2006-09-01T16:13:00.000+09:00

Yesterday was the second of two sunny days we've had here since August 23. We rode over to Tokyo Disney on the Hotel courtesy bus. The weather was perfect and the crowds weren't too bad, probably because it was a weekday. We rode the Western River Railroad, Pirates of the Caribbean, Star Jets, and Space Mountain.

We also saw Goofy's laundry hanging out to dry in ToonTown along with the Swiss Family Treehouse. What a great trip.

A few things are really remarkable about the park. First, there is no trash around anywhere. It's immaculate. Second, they seem to have an obsession with popcorn. We found five flavors: salted, caramel, chocolate, soda, and curry. Yes, that's soda popcorn and curry popcorn. We didn't try all of them, but we did enjoy a whole roast turkey leg which was really popular and had people queuing for quite some time.

Finally, there is a truly amazing variety of costume animal ears on display there! Young, old, girls, guys, it doesn't matter. Everybody loves them and they can be worn in a number of ways: headband style, hat style, clip-on / barrette style. They also may come with a tiny hat or an entire stuffed animal perched on top. Here are a few examples!