Me and david wanted to see a few more things before we
left. First up was a life-sized gundam
(giant, like, 6 story human piloted robot from a show of the same name). This gundam was constructed years ago and to
our knowledge had been torn down when whatever reason that it was put up was
over. Only I had just found out by
chance that day that it had been re-assembled at some new classy shopping area
on a man-made island in Tokyo. So, david
said we absolutely needed to go and I really saw no reason to go somewhere else
for that day. It was located at a fancy
shopping mall that specialized in basically American shops. Like American eagle and banana republic and
so on. Expensive American clothes
mall. That and the gundam café with life
sized robot stationed on one side of the mall.
Kind of doesn’t fit in. Anyway we
got tons of pictures of that, and coincidentally happened to come only a minute
before it started to move, which it does only 3 times a day for a few minutes
each time. So we were very lucky over
all. After, we bought stuff in the
souvineer shop “gundam café” and sat down on the mall steps and took a break
since it was raining. David took that
opportunity to say how awesome it was that we took over a year to study Japanese,
work our asses off, travel halfway around the world and take another hard
program all in Japanese all leading up to the moment where we get to see a
giant robot in real life. So, I guess it
was pretty awesome after all. I
certainly had fun, and bought lots of stuff, and took lots of pictures. At the very least, my friends sure will be
jealous.
The
next day we wanted to go to the ghibli museum.
Ghibli is basically the only anime company that americans know. It’s the studio that makes every anime film that
makes it to theaters in America. It’s
more internationally recognized than other anime studios due to the style and
plot just being more to the tastes of an international audience. Oh, and it only does movies, not shows, to my
knowledge. So, because of that success
it’s sort of like the Disney of anime or something along those lines, and it
has a little museum somewhat outside of Tokyo.
Apparently it’s really hard to get to since it’s normally sold out on
weekends. I thought we might be able to
go to a gift shop or something without needing a ticket, so I took that chance
and walked over to it to find out that was impossible after all. There are
little shops for this company all around the country so I will just have to
look in more local locations for those sorts of souvenirs. So, we took a long walk back to the train
station and wasted like 3 hours overall.
But the walk was nice because I passed many kinds of houses and took a
bunch of pictures of these houses so you all could get an idea of what a Japanese
house looks like. They are pretty
uniform in dimension, being tall rather than wide, and all having not fences so
much as solid stone walls. You might
also see how little parking space there is.
Japanese must be ridiculously good at parking cars. I don’t think I could manage to park in the
spaces that they have to.
I
forgot to say earlier but on the same day we went to go see the large robot we
did go to see sky tree – the tallest building in the country, and Tokyo tower –
a previously super tall structure. They
were right around the area and we did that our hostel was at, so we basically
just followed the large structure in the sky until we were there.
Finally,
on the last day of our Tokyo trip, we headed out to a shrine – the meiji
shrine, made in honor of the emperor and era of the same name that was a
restoration period of japan in the early 1900s.
So, pretty important shrine. It
had a park surrounding it which was cool since it was completely shaded, and
the shrine itself was quite large. When
we were there we of course took tons of pictures again, but I also came up with
the idea to leave proof that we were there and to thank our teachers who helped
us get to where we are. There are small
pieces of wood that you can write on and hang up with many others for the
purpose of praying or thanking others. I
have pictures of all of this. I bought
one and wrote on it something like “We hope for the health, time, and strength
needed to continue studying Japanese, and hope to return to japan again some
day. [in Japanese] thank you very much sakamoto sensei and nakagawa sensei (our
Japanese teachers in America who wrote letters that allowed us to be accepted
into the program)” and then signed our
names in Japanese, dated it, and hung it up.
So now it is there for everyone to see, for proof that we have been
there and to give proper thanks to our teachers for helping us to get
here. We took pictures so that we can
show our teachers when we get back. It
was the highlight of that day I think.
We got
back early after that, and packed everything up, and now here I am, the day
after, on a train to head to the next region – Japan’s previous, ancient
capital called Nara. There will be lots
of old and beautiful areas to see most likely.
And I will take pictures of it all.
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