Josh's spring break!

Ok, I promise to update more now that Joshua has left! He was here for 10 days and we had so much fun. I will try to recap all that we did :)

Saturday evening-March 15th : Joshua arrived at Narita airport at 5:30 pm. His plane was 15 minutes late, but that wasn't a big deal. I was so super excited when I got to see him for the first time in 5 whole weeks! We rode the train back to my apartment, which took about 1 hour and 45 minutes. I was pretty excited because he brought me lots of goodies from back home (thanks mom!). He also brought me an air mattress so I could go crash on Carly's apartment floor for the week.

Sunday: Carly, Joshua, and I went to the 10:30 church service. Afterwards we went to Matsudo station and had lunch with Keiko (the lady who helped Carly and I a few weeks ago when the trains were delayed because of the wind). It was nice to catch up with her a bit. In the evening Carly and I made puppy chow with the ingredients my mom sent. It was such a nice treat!

Monday: Carly, Joshua, and I headed out to Asakusa in Tokyo. We of course got some ice cream! We did a little shopping and I picked up a few gifts for some people. It was pretty cool because as we were walking through the crowds Carly got asked to be interviewed for the 6 o'clock news. They asked her questions like if stuff in Tokyo was more expensive than in America.

Tuesday: We headed out to Akihabara, commonly called "Electric town." This is the place you go if you want cheap gadgets. I found a 2 GB memory card for my camera for only 900 yen (about $9.00). My old memory card, which was 128 MB, held approximately 50 pictures. With the 2 GB memory card I can now hold 915 pictures!! So basically it was a great deal because now I don't have to worry about running out of space on my camera and I can just snap away. I was pretty excited when we were here because I found a Mac store. It was pretty cool!

Wednesday: Josh and I went to Hibiya Park and the Imperial Palace. This was probably my most favorite day. The park was absolutely beautiful. There were a lot of benches for sitting around a good sized pond. The water was shallow enough you could see the fish swimming around! There were also some ducks on the water. After walking around a bit we went over to the Imperial Palace grounds. I was excited to see an actual moat! haha There were these pretty bridges and some people offered to take our picture for us (as you can see below). We also found this fountain park that was pretty amazing. Funny story: At one point I was taking me and Josh's picture by the fountains when we noticed one of the guards coming near us. We got scared and figured we must have done something wrong (although we couldn't figure out what), so I grabbed my coat and purse and we started to walk away. The guard caught up with us and politely asked if he could take our picture for us. What a relief! I thought it was awful nice of him.


Thursday: We were a little worn out so we just stayed around Matsudo. We went to this place called "Book Off" where they have used books, CDs, movies, and video games.

Friday: Yasu (Josh's friend from Japan that was his roommate at UNL) recommended we go to Roppongi Hills, so we decided to try to go find it! Unfortunately as soon as we walked out my door that afternoon we noticed it looked a bit cloudy. Not to be discouraged, I grabbed my umbrella and we were off. We weren't entirely sure where the shopping center was, so we just got off at the train station close by and walked around. Typical me, I forgot my umbrella on the train and as soon as we started walking it started raining! We found shelter in a convenience store where we bought a tiny blue umbrella (that barely could cover one person) for about 5 dollars. We finally found Roppongi Hills. It was just a giant shopping center. There was this garden of flowers with this huge spider statue next to it. They also had a wall with water flowing down it. We managed to get a few pictures despite the rain. We wanted to go to Harajuku, so we just started walking in the general direction. If you know me you know that my sense of direction is terrible and we ended up going in a big circle. We did find a sweet graveyard though!

As it was getting dark we decided to head home. Neither of us had much money and we didn't want to run short for the train fare, so we decided to hit McDonalds for a quick dinner. We ordered everything off the dollar menu! haha It was a fun adventure :)


Satuday: I had to go to school/work in the morning for the closing ceremony for the students. It was their last official day before spring break. I came back to my apartment and we had lunch and headed to Machida City to visit Yasu's family (Josh came to Japan last year with Yasu over Christmas break and he wanted to see Yasu's family again while he was here). With the walking time to the station and to Yasu's house it took us 3 hours to get there!! It was definitely a long time sitting on that train. We eventually made it though and we were treated to a very nice dinner. Both of Yasu's parents speak English, so we were able to communicate with them. We didn't get back to Matsudo until about 12:30 that night. We were both pretty tired!

Sunday: Happy Easter! Unfortunately Christian holidays are not celebrated here and I was stuck at the school Sunday morning for the Junior High School graduation ceremony. We got done around noon and Josh, Carly, and I were able to make the 2:00 church service in Tokyo. This week we visited a different church from before. Carly found this one through Campus Crusade. It was very large, maybe 100 people. It was a pretty good service though. Afterwards we headed home and chilled the rest of the evening.

Monday: Josh had to leave and go back to America!! Only 12 more weeks until I come home!