Long weekend.

Tsukareta! (I'm tired). Today I had a 3 day weekend, which was great. Friday night, I met up with Hoko and Manami in one of my favorite areas of Tokyo- Ikebukuro. It's kind of a small area, but there are a ton of things going on there. Our mission was to eat at Mo Mo Paradise, my favorite restaurant in Japan. If you come visit me, I will guarantee you that we will eat here ;) Bascially, it's all-you-can-eat for 90 minutes of shabu shabu or sukiyaki. We chose shabu shabu. Here's what the spread looks like.


Here's how it works. They bring you all the meat and vegetables your stomach can handle. So the thin red meat is beef, and the pink meet is pork. Then you throw it in the boiling water/broth that's in the middle, and dip into either of the two sauces you see near the center of the picture. These aren't yummy-yummy, yucky-yucky sauces though, they're ponzu and a sesame-based dressing. Both are delicious. I gained weight. Also, Manami found a coupon on her cell-phone (yes, that's Japan for you) so we all got a free drink. I had whiskey and water. Yum. Okay, enough about momo. Oh one more thing, momo is supposedly the sound a cow makes in Japan (not moo-moo), thus the fairly cruel name, Mo Mo Paradise.

Ikebukuro at night-



Anyhoo, after that, we headed to an izakaya, but had to catch the last train fairly early (like 1130) so i'd be able to make it home. Came home, slept, woke up, had a fairly uneventful Saturday. Ate some good food at the train station though. Can't really remember much else.

Fun at the Izakaya- A very candid Hoko and Manami + a seductive me.



Sunday, I headed to Kashiwa to meet up again with manami. Kashiwa is a cool kind of "mini-tokyo" about 35 minutes away by train. Tons of badass used clothing stores, restaurants, etc. I found this amazing yello jethro tull 1978 tour t-shirt that i'm still considering buying, but it's a fairly hefty price. But it's SOOO badass. We went into this one store where there was this techno song playing and the lyrics were "Sit on my face. Sit sit sit on my face." It was hilarious, especially becasue I dont think any of the employees or customers had any idea what they were saying. In case you're wondering- in Japanese it's "Watashi no kao no ue ni suwatte kudasai."

Then I went to Manami's house for sukiyaki dinner. Nice. It was pretty funny, because i could barely communicate with her relatives. Her cousin, aunt, and uncle came over just to see my face. Right when the uncle walked in and saw me, he said nothing, he just started cracking up. It was funny. As the night went on, we discovered our mutual love for classic rock. His favorite band was fucking Toto, for christ's sake. Totally awesome.

Here's a picture of her house.

Quaint, eh? (I dont know why this picture won't rotate. Deal, I guess.)

So, we left her house and went back to Kashiwa. Looked around and some different shops, ate some delicious ramen (her choice, not mine, i swear), and then I headed home. Upon returning to Tsuchiura, the sky looked crazy, so I decided to take some pictures. These are from downtown Tsuchiura near the train station.



COOL! That's all for now. Love you all.