Japan in brief.

[not_to_50]

Oh wow, it was a great experience. Where to begin...I lived in the country, but on the outskirts of a very small city, which was itself on the outskirts of a larger city, which was on the far far outskirts of Tokyo, as most things tend to be on middle-honshu. I went to a Japanese school every day with my host brother in the larger city mentioned above, and we went to school by two different trains, at about an hour both directions each day. I joined Dance club, which was, in fact, chearleading club during that period of the year(baseball season), and thus I joined chearleading club, which practiced every day after school, and on saturdays, with games on sunday. All the clubs had as rigorous a schedule, resulting in most students having little freetime, especially after studying for the barrage of tests(whose end results are meaningless) which occured weekly. I spent a good deal of the free time I did have either riding my bike around the countryside, or riding a train into town to meet with friends. We did purikura almost every time we met, and I was able to do Karaoke once, which was amazing, since they had every anime song I wanted to sing available. Now-adays there are very few DDR machines(I saw two, and played both with american friends), but almost all arcades have a taiko drumming game of the same nature, but nowhere near as fun. I did this with friends many times as well. I also visited tokyo twice, and spent three days there at the beginning of the trip when I arrived in Narita airport. The tokyo tower area is amazing; it isn't crowded, and it has a number of small and large natural parks inserted between office buildings. There was one enourmous park complex that just kept climbing up until you were on a hidden hill, surrounded by forest, looking out onto the city. I tried to find it from the outside, but from the outside all I could see were the buildings. Tokyo tower is like the Eiffell tower if the eiffell tower cared about you. The viewing deck is indoors with enourmous windows(of course), and huge LCD touchscreens displaying an image of the buildings you are looking at, one from each angle of the tower, so that you can walk around and, from each position, touch the screens to discover what the buildings are called and used for. I also ate in a traditional ramen vending cart run by a husband and wife, with excellent ramen. The two other times I visited I saw Shibuya and Shibuya fashion, NHK headquarters(or TV tokyo, I can't remember which), Aki-habara, and the Ghibli museum. The Ghibli museum was just as amazing as I had always dreamed it to be. It was a transcendental experience, punctuated by the Ghibli short film that could only be viewed at the museum, called "Hoshi wo katta hi" or "The day I bought a star".
I bought many things throughout the trip, and I can't list them all, but the electronic toys I bought were many and illustrious, and my gatcha gatcha ball figurines are quite many in number.

That is my trip in brief summery. I may post pictures in my LJ later.

not_to_50