'Nother Brushfire

There was another brushfire in the Griffith Park hills area, just above the LA Zoo. It was pretty small and they got it under control in a matter of hours.

Field Trip

Debbie and I and some friends from our Japanese class went out to Little Tokyo tonight. We bought some brush pens, ate at a new restaurant (new to us), and then finished up at Oiwake for some booze and Karaoke.

Konnichiwa

Debbie and I are now taking Japanese lessons! We've had 2 sessions so far, and we'll be meeting 2 days a week until June. Hopefully we'll be able to get around a bit easier when we take our next trip. We can already ask someone's name, give our own name, ask where someone is from, tell someone where we're from, say sorry, good day, and ask/tell what language someone speaks.

watakushi wa nihongo ga sukoshi wakarimasu!

Los Angeles Wildfires

Wednesday smoke from the Lake Arrowhead fires really covered Los Angeles. It was mostly high level smoke though, and you could even see some blue sky in the picture.


Thursday however the winds died down so the smoke just settled over Los Angeles in a vast miasma that reminded me of the smog in Beijing.


Hopefull the onshore breeze will start up on Friday and blow all this stuff back east. :)

Yet more Japan...

I've posted links to the remainder of my Japan pictures on Flickr. I'll endeavor to upload all of my remaining pictures to all the appropriate days on my flickr page, so that the entire record will be up there.

By the way, if you happen to be near little Tokyo, check out the Curry House. There's one in Torrance, Cypress and West LA too, so you've got no excuse. They're awesome.

Some Halo action

Here's me and my buddy Blackhawk deftly avoiding a rocket shot.

Yet another update coming....

It's been tough getting back to this, what with a resurgance of interest in leveling up my 'lock in WoW, D playing Second Life, a near fatal kitty-kidney problem, and of course Halo 3 coming out.

But I will endeavour to update again tonight (after Survivor of course).

All of this would be much easier if the flickr uploader DIDN'T FAIL TO UPLOAD MORE THAN 5 OR 6 IMAGES AT A TIME!!! Seriously, I've got several hundred pictures to upload to flickr. It's a right pain in the ass to have to do them in batches of 5.

FIX YOUR STUPID APP FLICKR!!!!!!!!

Alright, alright!

I'm updating again. sheesh

We're back!

We've made it safely back to the US but as you'll no doubt notice the trip entries aren't done. I'm working on getting them all up to date by the end of the week. At least my internet connection is faster and more stable at home than in Japan, so I should have less grief getting all the pictures uploaded.

Anyway, the next batch of pictures will no doubt be coming from our Vegas trip this weekend. We're going to see Spamalot at the Wynn!

Japan Day 26 (ni jū roku)

Going Home!

Japan Day 25 (ni jū go)

Final Don Quijote Trip

Japan Day 24 (ni jū yon)

Penultimate Shopping Day


Today we went out to Asakusa to check out the Flame d'Or and the temple.

Here's the flickr link to our shots:
Asakusa

Japan Day 23 (ni jū san)

Tsukiji Fish Market & Asakusa

Today we got up early to head over to see the famous Tsukiji Fish Market. We knew approximately where it was, but we really didn't know what to expect when we got there.

Here is the link to all our Tsukiji pictures on flickr:

Tsukiji Pictures

Japan Day 22 (ni jū ni)

&mpSunshine City Mall, Aquarium, ; Zoo

Today we took the subway all the way out to Ikebukuro to go to the Sunshine City mall. It's a big shopping area. Lot's of department stores and smaller shop's along the main drag.



Movies look good...


Once we made it to the mall, Ultraman was waiting outside for us. Turns out this is an anniversary of Ultraman, so all the toy stores have tons of Ultraman figures. It seems like they changed his outfit every year because there are at least 20 of them.


Like many places in Tokyo, the mall is at the bottom of several skyscrapers. At the top of one of them is an aquarium/zoo.
Unfortunately it was dark inside so most of my fish photos came out blurry. I've put up some of the better ones.



This one had archer fish in it, which shoot a stream of water out of their mouth to knock bugs into the water where they can eat them.



My mom should remember this little guy from when we had a salt-water tank...

Turns out they also had a Spawn of Cthulhu



Outside on the roof they had a sea lion show, as well as a monkey cage, a penguin enclosure, and some walk through exhibits.


The walkthrough was populated with what I think are capybaras. They were free to wander around inside, mingling with the tourists.


And for some reason they had a lemur in a cage...


At the end of the walkthrough they had a couple of these cute little foxes:


..and also an armadillo butt...


Next to that was the penguin pool



They also had some neat pelicans. Those birds were big!



In a big tank by themselves, they had a couple of sunfish. They weren't as big as the one I saw at the Monterey Aquarium, but they were still good sized.


Debbie poses with the aquarium mascot:


After the aqaurium we went back down into the mall and over to another skyscraper to go up to its observatory level. This one even let us get on the roof, but it closed at sunset, which was about 5 minutes after we got up there.



That's Shinjuku in the distance. Tokyu Hands is near the bottom of that Chrysler Building look-alike.


After the observatory we went back down into the mall to find a restaurant where we had a good chance of being able to communicate with the staff. We wound up at a nice Chinese restaurant. The next two pictures show two places that we didn't stop at. I wonder what they serve?



After dinner we headed back out into the night, headed for the train station (with a stop at BIC camera).

Japan Day 21 (ni jū ichi)

Return to Harajuku

As Juan pointed out earlier, we completely missed Yoyogi-koen, so we headed back out to check out the 50's guys and hit up the shopping area.

Here's our favorite post office, just at the top of the street, up from our apartment. We'd stop here before heading out for the day because there was a convenient ATM inside.


Post office workers don't wear latex in the states (not that I've seen at least)


We went straight to the park after getting off the subway and walked pretty far into it. We saw lots of people enjoying their Sunday in the blistering heat, but where were the 50's guys?


After walking a good ways in to the park and not seeing anything that exciting we headed back out so Debbie could wade through the throngs of people in the shopping district.


Out of the park and around the corner, the Harajuku girls were out in force.


Here's the road down to all the little shops. Debbie will have a blast. I will be hot and bored.


At least we found some maid outfits for Debbie!


Needless to say, I did not go in.


We wound up going back to the same sushi joint that we went to with Tomoko and Hide and friends.


After lunch we headed back out to the park to find the 50's guys. Of course more interesting people had shown up at the bridge. Frighteningly, not all Harajuku girls are girls.


Here are some more that really are girls.


When we entered the park this time the dancers were out in force. This group looked like something out of a Japanese 'Happy Days'. They were dancing to a mix of 50's tunes set to a kind of techno beat. Very weird. But what else would you really expect from a group of people dressed in 50's outfits dancing in the middle of the park when its blazing hot outside?


Across the hedge from them these guys were competing for boombox volume.


Check out the hair on that dude!


And I'd be remiss if I didn't include a video...