November 23, 2005

I talked to Mum and Dad till like 3 last night cause I figured I'd be able to sleep in this morning. Not so much. Nomura san called me at like 8:30 to tell me that he had gotten my email and would be glad to come with me to the Elementary school. I finally fell back asleep when the gas guy who was supposed to come on Dec 5th between 1 and 2 showed up at my door at 10. Well that was it. I was up. I made plans with Chris to meet and I discovered that the museum with the Hokusai exhibit was open today, so I headed into Tokyo just after 12. I really didn't want to go anywhere today.

I went around the museum a little bit. I couldn't get into the Hokusai exhibit, it was too busy for the short time I had, I never would have made it. So I went in the general Asian collection. Some thing about seeing carvings of a god from over 4000 years ago makes me weep. I headed out to Asakusa to meet Chris and Yasuko and the Brackens in front of the Sensoji temple gate. We were all late, I was lost and they were just late so it worked out just fine. We walked down the route of all the booths, I think the Brackens would have stopped at everyone if they could have. We ate sembe and looked at all the touristy things. We got to the temple and took some pictures, got our fortunes and went in the temple. Mr B and a good fortune. Yasuko's was regular, Chris, Mrs B and I all had bad fortunes. Mine was officially bad, but I kind of liked it "You cannot go forward, you must return to your home country. In your home country you will not find conflict, you will be at peace." I'm okay with that. My other favourite part was, "The person you are looking for will come, but will be late". I'll read that how I want to read that. Unfortunate that I don't believe it. As I was shaking the container I was praying that only the Lord would be in my fortune, and then I shook and shook and nothing would come out. It was quite funny. I was starting to figure that I was to die tomorrow as I didn't have a fortune. We went around the side of the temple and found some booths to eat at. They had some takoyaki (octopus balls), Robbin had some okonomiyaki (cabbage, veggie, Japanese pizza goodness) and I had a GIANT long hotdog. Then we got some deep fried mochi.

We went from there we were done eating and we took the subway to a kitchen district. There's some incredibly beautiful pottery there. Then we decided to go pick up my bag full of stuff to go back to Canada, I don't think the Brackens are going to be able to take ANY of it, and head home. I talked with Yasuko about the kekkon shiki MC stuff and I left them at Tokyo station.

Now I'm packing for Kyoto and I need to shut off the comp so that I can get it in the bag first and then pack everything else around it.