Friday, February 29, 2008

MORE pics!

I'm on a roll! I actually just took some of these last night though, I went out with some friends to Roppongi and we met in front of that giant spider sculpture in the picture. It's right in front of the Roppongi Hills Mori tower, which is the building pictured. The 52nd floor of that building also happens to be where Mado Lounge is located, the club I believe I blogged about before in which there are giant windows and a fantastic view of Tokyo. There's actually a "Tokyo City View" that you can you go up to and look out over Tokyo, like an observation deck or something (I guess, I haven't actually gone to see for myself). I may try to go at some point, although since I've been here I've seen Tokyo from the top of the Tokyo Tower, from the Mado Lounge, from the bar in Shinjuku that was in Lost in Translation (that one was the 47th floor I think, although I could be remembering wrong...), from the Rainbow Bridge both in daytime on the monorail and at night on the Ageha shuttle, from an observation deck in Odaiba... I do love me those Tokyo city views, haha.
The balloon snowman is from Christmas, it was up marking the entrance to Takeshitadoori in Harajuku over the Christmas season.

In other news, I got a fridge today, yay! I'll post a picture of it once I get around to taking one. It's tiny, but yay for being able to keep perishable foods again!


Tuesday, February 26, 2008

やっと携帯電話の写真!









or, at long last, pics from my phone! Watch out, this post is picture-heavy.

So, what have we got here? A packed train in Shibuya - note the salaryman squeezing himself on even though there is no room. He will MAKE room and catch that express.
A whole crab, painstakingly put back together for this photo op. This was at a sushi restaurant, where we ordered a crab-flavored miso soup. Little did I know that crab-flavored meant there would be an actual CRAB floating in there! Yes, that thing was merrily floating in our soup, limbs and eyes and all.
A couple pictures from a taiko demonstration in Machida a couple months ago. I couldn't really get close enough for good pictures, sadly - it was pretty crowded all around where the street was blocked off. You can see a little though.
Purikura pictures with various friends. Purikura is the quintessential high school girl activity - basically you go into a booth with some friends and you can choose from various backgrounds and things to take a picture on, then after you're done you go out and decorate the pics with sparkles and ribbons and accessories and all manner of things. It's pretty fun for college graduate foreigners too : p
Shot of the roller coaster from Tokyo Dome city. It was a really fun coaster, you could see over all of Tokyo at the top, and at one point it actually goes through the middle of a Ferris wheel.
And finally, a pic of a building I thought was pretty cool in Ginza.

Thursday, February 7, 2008

アパートと隣




There hasn't been a ton going on here lately, so have some pictures of my neighborhood in lieu of anything more exciting ^^; I went out last weekend and got snowed on, but fortunately I haven't gotten sick again despite walking home in the snow in the wee hours of the morning, haha. I've been trying to start studying Japanese a little more regularly; found an application for my phone that'll let me review kanji and vocab while I'm on the trains, and I found a kanji game for the DS that looks like it might be good, so I'm probably going to pick that up sometime soon as well. I've been poking around Japanese forums as well, and watching some Japanese TV shows without subs. I'm going to try to go out this weekend with one of my Japanese friends; he said he might be free if he manages to finish what he's working on by Friday.