SATURDAY AND SUNDAY-Welcome to Tokyo

Well, Saturday was a pretty crazy day. Carly and I had to get up and go to school at 8:30 for the chorus festival. The junior high consists of 7th, 8th, and 9th graders. Then each grade is split up further into four or five groups, labeled ABCDEF. Every group (14 in all) sang two songs. The choirs were accompanied by a student playing the piano and directing. Pretty impressive if I don't say so myself! They turn it into a competition and at the end one group from each grade wins. After the winner was announced all the girls were crying, either because they won, or because they didn't. I was very impressed with the quality of the music from the kids. It was a lot of fun. It lasted until around noon.

Carly and I came home, changed, and ate lunch and decided to head out to Tokyo! Mr.Sypal was going to go with us, but at the last minute he had to go to a funeral. The weather had been beautiful all day, but of course the moment we stepped outside our apartments it got cloudy! On the way to the station it started sprinkling, but decided to go anyways. We made it to the station and got to Tokyo in one piece! It was a bit chilly and getting windy, but we walked around for a few hours. We found some cute little stores and did a lot of window shopping. At this one area it was really cool cause there were all these people doing their own thing. There were a few street performers, some guys drawing and making these sweet pictures, a girl playing the guitar, and then there were these hardcore kids standing around with a sign that said "Free hugs." I decided since it was free and all, I should go for it :)

On the way home it was really frustrating because we couldn't figure out which train to go home on. We finally just went back to the station we came on and found where we needed to be. In Japan there is the "express" train and the "local" train. The local train stops at every stop and takes twice as long as the express trains that only stop at the major ones. About 3/4 of the way home the train stopped and everyone got out. I started to get a little confused and all of a sudden this Japanese woman came to us, speaking English, and told us that we had to get off the train. She went and asked one of the officers what was going on. She came back to us and said that they weren't running the trains any further because the winds made it too dangerous! We were stuck!! We called Mr.Sypal and he advised us to get some dinner and wait it out. We asked our new friend to go with us and the three of us headed to Dennys for dinner. We learned her name was Keiko and was a christian. Pretty much she was a God send!!! Two hours later the winds died down enough that we were able to take a train the rest of the way home!

Sunday-today-I pretty much did nothing! Carly wasn't feeling well after we ate dinner the night before so we we both slept in this morning. I'm so used to getting up at 7am that I kept waking up. I think I finally got out of bed at around 9:30am because I couldn't sleep any longer. I didn't really do anything all day. I showered, did some laundry, made spaghetti for dinner, and practiced my Japanese. I was going to go exploring around the neighborhood, but the wind was super strong and very cold that I didn't feel like being outside! It was a relaxing day though.