Big time now

In our grand effort to relaunch ourselves with this new and improved blog ( FYI, the last blog was called the real life of Mark and Emily, now, we are realer) we are celebrating our one week blog anniversary, and a total of 126 visitors in our first week, which isn’t surprising because we are the most fabulous couple ever, who wouldn’t want to read about us, kidding - but seriously?! So for all you special viewers out there, free Japanese candy is at stake – so leave your name in the comments on this post, or for you that are slightly impaired when it comes to the blogosphere, just email one of us! You have T-72 hrs (Tues night 11th, we'll announce on Weds.), you only need to drop your name once and then Mark will figure out a very nerdy but fair way of picking a winner (I’m thinking it will involve graphing paper, a wind tunnel and a calculator)! And since our blog spans the globe, we’ll mail it wherever you live, so show us some love people!

Sayounara Japan

The time has come and tonight is our last night of fun in Japan, tear. It's a little sad, we've had a blast as you can tell and for our last night some of Mark's coworkers took us out for another interesting dinner! This time we had okonomiyaki which is like Japanese pizza. We cooked at the table but it was all kinds of seafood, meat, and noodles and then we made Japanese pizza which was cheese and vegetables that look more like a pancake and a really cool soup with vegatables. It was a good time. Mark and his coworkers in front of the restaraunt. Mark decided to join in this time with the peace sign!
Shrimp!! I ate one too for the record, and those little eyeballs were staring at me the whole time, it was tricky!

Zoorasia

Yesterday I went to a really great zoo with my friend Nicole and her son Clark. The landscaping was really great and there were some different animals there that I hadn't seen before like, a Samoan Orangatan which was HUGE and an Okapi which looks like a zebra from the legs down, but is actually related to the giraffe. It can lick it's own ears, cool right?O.k., so the animals were great and we were all having a great time until I put Clark down to walk over to some stairs to view the otters and he faceplanted. He had learned that morning to put his hands in his pockets, which made him look pretty cool and kept his hands warm, but he didn't want to take them out and therefore his cute little face took the brunt of his fall! He still insisted through his cry that he wanted to see the otters, he loves the zoo!

It turns out that he doesn't just know where the gorillas nipples are he also knows what they are called too, he's a good talker and this is one word he can say really good! It was hilarious! I hope Nicole supports my posting this, we had a good laugh over it.

On a completely different note... today I was riding on the train and saw an empty pop can on the floor just a little ways down from where I was sitting. There is NO trash left anywhere, so not only was I surprised to see it I was even more surprised that at the next stop a grandma came on with a few other ladies and she just took a little garbage sac out of her purse and picked it up and put it in there! No one seemed to notice it, even the ladies she was talking with, just another one of the great things the people do here in Japan! I will miss this place with all its cleanliness! Something like that would probably never happen at home, somebody might kick it under the seat though!

Things you thought you knew about Japan. By Mark

1. Everything is in Japanese. Not true. Clothing with phrases are virtually only in English, like when I saw a black football jersey with the name “Joker Player”. But sometimes the spelling is funny like a band that played on the street named “Supremen” and a sign at the Zoo that said “These animals are unawalable”.
2. There is no graffiti in Japan. Not true. I saw some one time with words like pimp and sex but all the graffiti was also only in English.
3. It is crowded here. Maybe a little. Just refer to the video below named “Shibuya Crossing Tokyo!” that was posted on November 3, 2008.
4. If you watch Heroes, you'd remember Hiro Nakamura was exercising with other workers of their company in a field before work. So do they stretch before work here? Yes they do and the intercom system plays funky music and then the counting starts…ichi, ni, san, shi, go…
5. If you like Japanese restaurants back home you will love the food in Japan. Not necessarily true. Here is a list of the food I have tried here: Sashimi (raw fish-salmon, tuna, and unknown), yakitori (meat on skewers including liver, chicken hearts, shrimp head, chicken skin, cold sausage, and unknown), yakiniku (small pieces of meat that are cooked by me at my table), and deep fried meat with two eggs sunny side up and one piece of rare bacon. Note: They do also have sushi too but not as popular as in the USA. I loved the yakiniku and ate there Four times.
   
   Other things to note: They always eat everything on their plate including the small pieces of rice that get stuck to the bottom of the bowl, not everyone is short but a lot of people are, they wear uniforms to school even on the weekend, most everyone only wears long sleeve shirts but a lot of girls have super short skirts or shorts but then wear long socks to make up the difference, even the men have hand bags, everyone has cell phones but no one talks on them (they play games and maybe text ), most people use there camera phone like a digital camera, everyone is willing to help you if needed, even the teenagers get up to let old people or mothers have a seat on the train, they wear a mask if they are sick, it is safe to walk around even at night.

A summary of us

I realize now that some of you were not following our old blog in which I somehow killed, so you are not really aware of what we are up to (thanks Mike)!! So here it is: We are not living in Japan, just here so Mark can work and I can play, I know life is rough for me! We will be here 3 wks in total and come home this Saturday. Home right now is actually the Seattle area where we have been for the past 2 and a half years. Mark is working for Boeing as an engineer and I am still doing hair. No kids, no pets, just us and the world that is the Northwest! As you continue to follow the blog, you'll catch on to other things I'm sure I am leaving out of this summary, thanks for taking the time to catch up with us! Let us know if there are other nerdy bloggers like us among our family and friends reading this so we can keep up with your lives too!

Last Day

Monday was luckily a holiday here, so we got in one extra day of being a tourist and decided to tackle Tokyo!! We expected total craziness, but there wasn't, thank goodness because by this point in our trip/weekend we are beyond exhausted and our poor feet are ready to be cut off! So I'm going to make this short, because we are tired and sum up the day in Tokyo:
1. Imperial Palace
2. Ueno Science Museum (guess who wanted to go?!)
3. Ameyayoko-cho Market
4. Shibuya Crossing
That's all we had time for, it was amazing and here is the proof!

Crazy Shibuya Crossing!

Eyeglass bridge

Bridge behind the eyeglass bridge. The palace and inner gardens are closed to the public except for once a year on New Years, so this is as close as we could get! It was still really cool!
Walking around the Palace and a view of the Tokyo skyline.
We didn't take many good pics of the science museum, which was luckily free because it wasn't as cool as we thought, or the market. We are glad we found the energy to do it all!

Shibuya Crossing Tokyo!

I counted 1355 people in one crossing, how many did you get?!

More of Japan

Are you over all the Japan entries yet or what?!! Too bad, we love it here and have only 6 more days, so here is where we went today. Sankein Gardens, we had to take a bus there so let me share with you our bus riding experience. It was our first time taking the bus from the station(besides from the airport) and it was a little tricky to find, but even trickier once we got on the bus and they announce all the stops in Japanese (naturally) but even though we know the name of our stop, it's hard to hear/understand the bus driver. So we look for signs outside that say Sankein Gardens and hope that the next stop takes us somewhat close. It did, we were golden and we even ran to catch it on the way back and when we turned the corner there was a HUGE line, I thought we would have to wait, but no, we packed in there real good, and I mean packed. It's hard to describe without me acting it out for you, but basically I was standing on one foot for 20 min.
Anyway, back to the gardens. They were built and donated by a businessman in the silk trade and so it has lots of tea houses, a 3 story pagoda, a few houses they lived in and a big pond or 2. It was nice, my friend informed me that the changing of colors for fall doesn't happen until the end of November here, so it was not as fall'ish as we had hoped, but still really great.

3 story pagoda and a tired husband, we were both tired by this time, I'm just the lucky one behind the camera. Mark is in charge of the video camera and me the digital, so I tend to snap him more than he gets me!

The main houses they lived in.

A bridge over one of the ponds, we can't really mix up the pics alot, it's either me taking it, Mark or Mark with me sneaking in.
Some cute guy I saw, asked if I could get his pic, he said ya..I'm so lucky!

Where did the food go?

Nicole brings up an interesting question in her last comment, "how was El Torito?". We heard about a great Mexican resteraunt by the station and in our usual starving dinner time manner we headed out to get our grub on. Obviously we had been subjected to smaller portion sizes here in Japan, in which we welcomed with open arms, until we got to El Torito. The classic opener of chips and salsa, was approx. 10 chips. So we ordered an appetizer, nachos. As you can see from below, we were still mighty hungry when our food actually came:

Again, a solid 10 chips maybe. The basket beside it was our chips and salsa FYI. Everyone in the place seemed to be ordering the fajita's so I went for it and Mark got an enchilada. To our stomach's delight the food was good, on the negative scale (I'd say a -4) for spicyness - but still good. However, for perhaps the first time ever, we went to a Mexican resteraunt and ate ALL our food!! That NEVER happens, and we weren't completely stuffed either. I could see why my friend who has lived her for 3 yrs already thinks it's great, because it's not fish, but to us newbies, it was just good. O.k., no more posts about the food, promise...pinky swear!!