Day Five: Asakusa and Akihabara

the days seem longer as they go by. i feel like ive been here for weeks.

i guess when our lives become so based on regular routine, the days become shorter. my life is the opposite. with no set plan or schedule, my days are free to do as i choose. because i am free to choose, i choose to stay busy.

like my parents always said, being busy keeps you out of trouble. i guess though that depends on what youre busy doing.

im amazed at how i can keep going regardless of the intense pain in my feet from the hours of walking, or how i can even stay awake at all to keep roaming around. i knew that when i came here, i would have to become accustomed to the huge amounts of walking, but i didnt expect that by day five my feet would still be hurting so bad.

but lets end the pity party right here and get down to brass tacks.

since i am officially on an good-will adventure, a new friend let me stay in one of his groups unoccupied-for-the-night-rooms, so i woke up in this unknown-to-me-girls-room. she wasnt there, which was good because if she had been there with me when i woke up, it would have made things awkward and been pretty weird.

i got my stuff together and headed outta there to asakusa, part of old school tokyo. famous for the kaminari-mon, or i guess what some folks would call the thunder gate, or maybe lightning gate.

i had met my friend jason there the night before, so i had seen it in the evening, and to be honest i think it looked better in the night. not to be cute or trite by saying that something looks better in the dark because it isnt beautiful, because the kaminari-mon was very beautiful, but i noticed a difference between now and last night.

the giant lantern thing that hangs down from the center had been rolled up for people to pass through the gate. you could not even read the kanji for kaminari-mon to let you know what was up. it was super ghetto, but it was still enjoyable to take pictures with the hundreds of other folks doing the same thing.

there were rickshaw folks all over the place riding people around. i saw something i had never seen before, which was a woman being the rickshaw...ist. it was good to see a woman doing a traditionally mans job in old japan.

past the entrance there was a street made up of shops and stores that had to stretch out for at least half a mile. each one had outside of it a japanese flag. i looked through the shops and finally found a cat coin purse to keep my change in. i was proud of that thing. i bought a taiyaki and headed more towards the main temple and park.

when i finally made it to the end of the row of shops, there were more shops, but they were all selling traditional japanese foods.


past the food places was the entrance to the tample. i opted not to take too many pictures on the inside considering i wouldnt like people taking pictures inside of my temple or place of worship for their own personal amusement.

there was a big beautiful park there just past the temple. it was full of shrines and other assorted goodies, like this big pagoda.


i looked around there for a little bit and eventually found my way to the outside of a small amusement park in the middle of tokyo, complete with these japanese clowns ushering folks in.

they might have just been a little bit spooky by american standards, but in my standards, which are rather american, they werent too extremely spooky.

i enjoyed them nonetheless. they made me really want to go into the amusement park, but money is short so i had to stay out. the folks inside looked like they were having a good old time though.

it was rough.

i then made my way to akihabara, the place know for being full or electronic goodies. it was full of electronic goodies, but it wasnt enough to keep my interest too high, so i took muh ol guitar out and tried to get myself feeling more energized for the day. it didnt work too well even though i was able to talk to some more folks.

i ate at a lot of different places, visited harajuku, shinjuku and shibuya again. i saw marybeth lathen, one of the sister missionaries from the tokyo south mission there, and it was joyous indeed.

i eventually made my way back to the train station where i would try to sleep for the night. i realized while i was about to use the phone that my friends phone number was in the cell phone, so i took it out only to find it was broken.

yeah, life just sucks sometimes. i had a broken cell phone, no way to get to my place of refuge and to make it better, it was raining kitties and doggies. i waited at the station for the rain to stop so i could walk to bens house, and as i was about to buy some bread to eat i discovered my cat that i bought to keep my money in was gone. id lost it somewhere while fiddling with my broken phone. so my cat was gone.

i went on a search for it. first i tried the train station, they had nothin, then i went to the building staff guys at the shopping center next to the station, they laughed at me because when i was in the bathroom, instead of pushing the flush button, i pushed the emergency "help me get off the toilet" button. i tried to keep it secret...but they knew. they didnt seem to mad about it though, actually they were really nice but could not find my lost cat.

they did an impression of a cat before i left though.

i apologized for pushing the wrong toilet button, i simply could not read the kanji.

i eventually walked back to bens house, it wasnt raining too much.

and that ended my day for the most part.

more havoc to come