And you call yourself a TOURIST!

So Japan is great for many reasons, but I added another one to the list yesterday when we had off for the “Spring Equinox”. Let me briefly explain the deal with holidays in Japan. There is pretty much some holiday/festival every week, but obviously all of them aren’t national because then nothing would ever get done. However, each month there are at least 2 national holidays that everyone gets off for. In fact, they love their holidays so much that a number of years ago there were no holidays in June so the Prime Minister at the time literally,just made one up out of thin air and called it some weird name like “The Beauty of the Sea Day” commemorating the contribution of the ocean to the lives of the Japanese. Now it’s a national holiday and everyone has off for it. Can’t beat that.

To celebrate the “holiday” we decided to head for Asakusa, the historical district of Tokyo, that has been recommended by several people for being “must-see”, “fabulous”, and “eh, kinda cool”. We decided to maximize the number of modes of transportation that we took during the day, so we started off by taking the subway to Shimbashi, taking the monorail one stop (literally a 45-second ride) to Shiodome, and then caught a boat to Asakusa down the Sumida River. But before that, we went to the Hamarikyu Garden where the pier was to look around. Out of nowhere in the middle of the garden was this enormous field FULL of these yellow flowers (the brochure called them “Rape Blossoms”; is that even a real flower? Any horticulturists out there? I’m thinking it was a classic case of Engrish – with hilariously bad consequences, as usual). It was gorgeous (look for yourself!)

After we satisfied our sensitive sides in the flower garden, we boarded the boat (called the Cute Dog Express, though there were no dogs involved much to my dismay. I pictured a small puppy with a captain’s hat on its hind legs driving the boat; boy was I disappointed). The boat was very cool, especially because we passed under 12 different bridges, all which looked completely different from one another. One non-highlight of the boat was the swarm (yes, swarm) of seagulls surrounding the boat after this little Japanese kid started throwing popcorn at them. Japanese people have such bad touristy judgment – even in their own country! These are the same people that tried petting squirrels at the Grand Canyon (squirrels are HUGE here, because there are none – there is a magazine, and I’m not making this up, called “Riisu no Sekai” which translates to “Squirrel World” in English).

After dodging bird missiles for a little while, the boat finally landed at the pier at Asakusa. And then came the people. See, I question my intelligence very much sometimes, mainly because of times like that when I don’t make the connection between national holiday, people having no work, and Asakusa being a touristy place. Why didn’t they teach associations like that at school?!

There were so many people lining the narrows streets of Asakusa that if you looked from on top of a roof down onto the main road, it would like a chaotic solid stream of black heads (with the occasional teenager with some weird colored hair) moving in an infinite number of directions. Asakusa is really neat though, and I definitely plan to go back there when it’s not so crowded that I could have literally crowd surfed anywhere I wanted to go.

What is also funny is that I have been wondering up until this point where the tourist traps are in Japan – I mean sure, there are stupid stuffed animals and highly-priced elevator rides that whisk you to the top of some building at 400 miles per hour, but I mean Japanese people do it too! It's not just foreigners! It’s not like Times Square where you know everyone is a tourist no matter who they are. Well, my question was answered in Asakusa. Nevertheless, they had some great souvenirs there, including sweet katana swords, kimonos, beads, jewelry, and porcelain – pretty much everything. They also had some horrible souvenirs, such as dog outfits (don’t get me STARTED on the Japanese dressing up their dogs), this stuffed penguin sitting on a toilet that would say things like (no joke) “That felt great!” and “It stinks in here!” in English when you pushed its flipper, and this cigarette butt disposal thing that had the words “Smoking! May peace prevail on Earth” written on it. Can’t make that stuff up.

To add to the weird touristy-ness, my friend Eric had to get Takoyaki, which is basically a bunch of baby octopi fried in some sort of ball and covered in mystery sauce. Enticing huh? I would’ve lost it when I saw the little tentacle poking out of this fried mass of stuff, but Eric seemed to enjoy it to some extent. There was also this freaky amusement park from like 1850 that was right next to one the oldest (and most famous) temples in Tokyo (talk about irony!). There was this freaky clown guy at the entrance yelling at us in Japanese to come into the park, which of course, made us even more frightened for our lives and sent us scurrying in the opposite direction (which of course, landed us smack dab in the middle of the red light district where we saw this guy with a huge bottle of liquor repeatedly push over his bicycle and clap at us).

The weirdness continued when we to Akihabara (the nerd district, as I call it) after we left Asakusa. Eric wanted to find a Nintendo DS so we figured that we’d all tag along. We got there and there was this huge crowd watching these men dressed up as women anime characters (see picture) doing the most ridiculous dance I’ve ever seen (it was sort of like a cross between the worst German polka you’ve ever seen, a hoe-down, square dancing, and the Moonwalk – a lethally dangerous combination if you ask me). Of course, we took numerous pictures, much to the delight of the freaky women-men.

So the Spring Equinox was spent quite well, in my opinion, and now we’re in the home stretch of school, with a little over two weeks of classes (eep!) to go. Expect some more weird stories in my next entry, since we are going to the Tokyo AnimeCon (the largest in the world) on Saturday. It’s going to be intense. Sunday we are planning to go to another baseball game at the Tokyo Dome.

Jaa mata ne!

Picture Guide: #1 - The flowers in the Hamarikyu Garden, #2 - The Gang on the Cute Dog Express, #3 - The masses at Asakusa, #4 - I just love this picture -- taken at Sensoji, #5 - The women-men at Akihabara