Tokyo!! Part 2

Sorry for the slight posting delay (apparently my readership was getting antsy!) It's hard to post during the week now that classes have started and I have three quizzes a day to study for. So it will have to be a flurry of weekend postings to catch everyone up on my comings and goings. I had a fun night tonight - after the first week of classes, we were all a little drained, so we decided, Indian food!! We found a place here and I was so happy because it had about 9 different vegetarian things to choose from. Being veggie in Japan IS difficult - I haven't eaten any large pieces of fish, but I've definitely eaten dashi (broth) with fish in it. It's definitely not an ideal situation but it's almost impossible to avoid - without eating fish based dashi or things with bonito (dried fish flakes) I wouldn't be able to eat at most Japanese restaurants. Fortunately, Yokohama has lots of other options, you can definitely still see the international influence (historically, the Hama is known for being a very international city, sort of a gateway to Japan. Lots of foreigners living in Japan would live here in a specific foreigner neighborhood known as the Bluff). I also googled shizen shoukuhin (natural food markets) here in the Hama and there are some options, so I am going to check one out, hopefully this weekend. Anyway, back to the Indian food, it was pretty good. Now, it was no Maharajah (the super yummy Indian restaurant in Madison) but a nice change of pace from the udon and soba and reasonably priced. We had some nan but no rice, it didn't come for free!! Still, a yummy dinner, we will definitely go back!!

Okay, so I promised to write more about Tokyo. We went to Akihabara (the electronics area) on Friday. On Saturday, we went back to Tokyo to go shopping in Shibuya. Shibuya is famous, especially for the street crossing (you can see it in the movie Lost in Translation - it also has a massive electronic billboard) where tons of people pour across at once - all the traffic stops so that at LEAST a thousand people can cross the street at one time. Crazy! Shibuya is a big shopping and nightlife destination, especially for trendy young people. On the weekends, Japanese women get really dressed up - there is some serious effort with stylish clothes, perfectly done nails, high heels, beautifully curled hair etc. Going shopping on the weekends is the big thing to do and generally, the Japanese are very trendy and brand conscious. I felt like such a schmuck next to them!! Shibuya, along with Harajuku, is also where you can see some of the stranger Japanese fashion trends, such as ganguro, which is where women tan their skin dark but then have very light hair. Lightened hair is pretty common here and many women take it to an extreme in the Shibuya area. We also saw some crazy punky hair and a guy wearing high heels and leather hot pants!! We went shopping in this tower known as Shibuya 109, which was pretty narrow and had lots of little stores packed in - it was very loud and jam packed with people, lots of pushing by to look at things, lots of loud, pounding music, lots of bright colors (especially pink - all the stores are women's clothing and I would say the crowd was 97% female). In Japan, whenever you enter a store, the clerks say irasshaimase (it is a polite form of saying welcome) and everyone working in the store says it to you as you come in. It's not like a Walmart greeter, where one person is the welcomer - rather, as you pass each clerk you get a very hearty irasshaimase (a nerdy note: Japanese is read by syllables, so you also pronounce the -se at the end as its own syllable - it's pronounced "say" not "see." Japanese is a really hard language, but the pronunciation is very easy!!). And in hearty, I mean in a high-pitched (almost unbearably so) and loud voice. In Shibuya there is a very specific tone to the irasshaimase that I can't really describe - if you've ever watched any anime, the female voices in that would give you an idea. It's almost like a doll voice, a very extreme, yet childlike, femininity. Most of the clothes were stuff that I would never wear, but I found a cute dress and top so all the exhausting shopping was worth it in the end!!