I'm a busy girl, in a busy world!

Hey everyone! This past week has been full of fun outings and school work.

Last Saturday, Sylvia, Jeanne and I went to Sunshine City in downtown Ikebukuro. It's a huge mall with shops (obviously) and a theme park inside! I really like Japanese fashion. The women here are very trendy. They rarely wear jeans and I've never seen a woman in any other type of pants. They often wear dresses with tights/stockings and heels, so there is a lot of "click clack click clack" in the train stations in the morning. Their outfits always look well put together and unique, even within a similar style. I see a lot of an old girly Parisian kind of style (I think) - with pale colors, lace, flowery patterns, bows, etc. It's very nice :-) and many of the shops reflect that kind of style, or a more urban one. Anyways, on saturday we ate at a small shop that we thought had the best combination of price and food options. A convenience of most restaurants is that they have small plastic props of the dishes they serve outside, so you can choose before you enter and order shortly after your seated. Which would have been nice, but we had such a hard time reading the names of what we wanted! I've gotten better but last week, even my katakana was shaky. So Sylvia read the name for me so I could say it later. Her's and Jeanne's were in kanji, so they had a worse time trying to figure it out. The hostess/waitress was patient with us, she even helped them with the kanji. After we ate we went through the mall and made stops at a bunch of places, including hello kitty (sooo cute!), a book store (where I bought two magazines), and the center of the mall for a concert. I just want to backtrack a little to say how much I enjoy magazines, and Japanese magazines are no exception! No, I cant read everything inside, but I can understand the pictures! Plus they're larger than what I'm used to, which is great! And one even came with a gift! So, back at the mall, a pop girl group called 9nine performed. They were so cute! It was a good introduction to Japanese pop. I mean, I've heard Japanese pop songs before of course, but they were at the end of tv shows or movies. I've never known who the voices were singing or seen a group perform, it was good! There were a bunch of men at the front of the stage, clapping and dancing, even more so than the women or young girls (who I'm pretty sure are the targeted audience lol). After a while we went to Namja Town, the theme park. The theme is adventure, and you walk around different "locations" and use these "who you gonna call? ghost busters!" looking gadgets to search for ghosts! We didn't find any but we did find Ice Cream Land! Which is exactly what it sounds like. I bought the cutest little house cake, that didn't actually have any ice cream in it (which I realized after I bought it lol). It was yummy! After that we were pretty tired so we decided to leave. But when we got outside, we felt like exploring some more, so we picked a direction and walked in it. We ended up walking into another area of downtown Ikebukuro. A ton of shops, salons, and karaoke (which is important later)! On the way home, we found out that its about a ten minute walk inside the subway station from downtown Ikebukuro to the station by the dorm! So exploring later will be easier.

On Monday, we started our co-curricular classes at school. I went to Japanese Song and Kawazoe, a beginner's conversation class. This upcoming week, I'm also going to try Hand Craft, which is something related to fashion. More on that later...

On Tuesday, after class a bunch of us went back to downtown Ikebukuro for karaoke! I forget what the name of the place, but it was big like an office building. We always have trouble saying what we want but with a series of pointing and various other hand gestures, we manage. We booked a room for two hours and ordered our first drinks, which are mandatory (mine was ginger ale :-) ) then went up to see our room. It was really nice! They have large windows so you can see the city, couches, tables, menus for food, and party lights. We sang, danced, ate, took pictures - it was a good time. I can see why it's such a popular outing, it felt like we were having a small party!

On Thursday, Max (another new student) took Jeanne, Sylvia and I to Harajuku. We were all hungry so we began the food search (going from place to place to look at the food props and prices) and settled on an American style cafe (I know why go to Japan just to eat American food? I just wanted to know what it was like...) It was just like an American cafe lol except that there was a smoking section, which happened to be right next to us, so...it was just like being in the smoking section. The food was good (I had a bar-b-que chicken sandwich with fries) and we watched Alice in Wonderland. After that, we explored a little but we got there so late that most of the stores were closing. So we decided to come back on Sunday (today) to see everything in full swing. Including the Harajuku girls that dress up in costumes, only on Sundays!

On Friday we went back to karaoke! But before that we had a tea ceremony at school. It was very nice :-) More on that later though because I have to get ready to leave for Harajuku! I promise to post pics soon.

Thanks for all the love, I appreciate it!

Until next time