I don't know how to take pictures
This is my neighborhood, as seen from the window in the stairwell. Oguradai, Chiba.
This is the first thing you see when you come in the house. No shoes allowed, of course!
This is Hisayuki's garden. He makes the most delicious jam with the raspberries he grows, and I eat it every single day for breakfast.
This is the guy you give presents to if you had a miscarriage or your baby died and you want them to be safe, somewhere. Hence the bottles of milk and baby toys you probably can't see!
This is where my great grandma's ashes are. Family visits it and picks the weeds around it and gives her fresh flowers and cleanses the stone with water.
Hisayuki and Ryu-chan, the cutest yet most devilish baby alive.
Chiba.
Makudonarudos is everywhere.
Yum!
Chiba is cute.
Bikes are lined up like this everywhere, and they are never locked up. It makes me really happy! There are also stands with umbrellas by the subway exits for anyone to use if they forgot one.
This is just a giant robot crab in Chiba.
Delicious vegetables.
You get to watch this dude clean and chop the heads off of fish before you buy it!
My cell phone here flips around like that so you can take pictures of yourself more easily. It also has a special Disney mode that I have it set on now, and when I send e-mail it shows Goofy throwing a message in a bottle out to sea. It also makes this really obnoxious YAHOO yelp from Mickey, but I finally had to turn it off because it made me want to die.
One of our first dinners here. I'll admit I didn't really know what to do with the eyeballs and rest of the head. Grandma just popped them in her mouth and I wanted to barf.
The only picture worth showing from Studio Ghibli. That place was so small and crowded that we didn't even want to stay inside. The majority of the time we just sat in the smoking area and ate ice cream.
I miss Mariko :[
Tokyo.
Tokyo.
Mural of Hachiko in Shibuya. NOT the famous meeting point! I will take a picture of that another day.
In every city here there are tons of teenagers just standing around the streets passing out flyers for random boring stuff, and usually the flyers are put inside little packs of tissue. I think it must be the worst job in the world, because it's humid as hell here and more than half the people that walk by them don't take what they are trying to pass out! I was accepting until I got a collection of like 6 tissue packs.
My happiest moment was finding these.
Shibuya 109 gets a big THUMBS DOWN! Never again.
Somehow this is the only picture I got of Harajuku? But it's really not the best place for pictures, because most of the cool stores are like teeny rooms in the 2nd or 3rd floor of buildings. When I am more comfortable with the language I might try to take pictures of the kids there, but for now I'm too shy!
The park that Masayo and Ryu-chan go to everyday.
Mariko, Masayo, grandma and Ryu-chan.
I'm a giant here.
Yoshiaki meets the family.
Sony Building in Ginza.
Again. It was actually the most boring place we went!
Ginza.
Ginza and Mariko's hand.
A better one?
A rare sight! Once school starts I will show subway station at rush hour.
At the hot spring in Yaita we all wore kimono. I looked dumb.
This is Eriko. She was my favorite in Yaita because she was always really happy and she would talk to me even though she knew I didn't understand. She told her mom that I dressed cute.
Our room at the hot spring resort. Grandma said it was like a fun sleepover, but it was one of the most uncomfortable times of my life. We ate a 14 course dinner that night, and I bathed outdoors with my sister.
A path from the resort led you here.
Nikko.
Nikko.
Nikko.
These guys are everywhere, but that's the biggest one I've seen! They are real animals, too.
My family!
I promise now I will post pictures as I take them, rather than wait a year and get too lazy to say much about them!