Nancy

I've had the best weekend I've had in a while. My old friend Nancy is up visiting me. She's living in Kumamoto City, which is on Kyushu and is quite near where I was living in Japan the first time. She grew up in Stewart, I grew up in Hyder, and we've known each other for twenty-plus years.

She came in on Saturday and as soon as we met, we were off running. First stop, my favorite kaiten sushi (conveyor belt sushi) in Tsudanuma for a late lunch. Then we headed out to Tokyo. I wanted to go see the Banff Film Festival, so we hopped the train, spent about an hour trying to find the venue (meanwhile walking all over the place and stopping to take pictures and ask directions a few times), and when we finally found where we were going....there were no tickets to be had. So we went to Odaiba instead.

Odaiba was great. We stopped in at the Toyota show room to ogle the new cars. We hopped in the driver's seats of a few of them. I folded myself into the storage space of a Prius. We went on a ride in a little electric car and had a general blast. We then took a ride on a giant ferris wheel (it's in the 2000 Guiness Book of World Records as being the largest in the world at that time). The view was great...lots of scyscrapers and lights. We then headed back to my neck of the woods where we rounded out a fun evening with dinner at an Outback Steak House.

Yesterday we started off with chocolate chip, walnut, oatmeal pancakes (made by me) and persimmons. We finally rolled out of the house around 10:30 to head over to Kamakura which is about 2 hours by train and is an area famous for its shrines. Once we got there, we ate lunch at a really good burger joint and then we traipsed around looking at shrines and statues. After we came back to my place, we ate at a little okonomiyaki restaurant near my house. Okonomiyaki is commonly described as a Japanese pancake. My okonomiyaki had cabbage, yakisoba, sliced pork, and a few other vegetables that was mixed into a batter and then cooked on the hotplate that sat between me and Nancy. Nancy's okonomiyaki had shrimp. Both were delicious.

Today Nancy is on her own because I have work, and tomorrow we're going out to Tokyo Disneyland for the day. Hopefully it won't be too crowded, but I'm not holding my breath.