Another slack post, but its Tokyo!

So I decided to make this post less text heavy and more pictures/captions.

Enjoy!

 This is the last day before vacation. I'm just chilling with Ernie

 I went to a Gundam bar later that night with Michelle Chang and her finance  Joel. Nice bar, a little on the overly dorked side though :p

 I bought this both for the Tokyo trip, and so that people have a bed to sleep on if/when they visit.

 Im at Osaka train station, waiting on my bus to Tokyo. I got there early to make sure I could find my way with time to spare. Always be prepared!

One of the MANY stops we made on the 9 hour bus ride to Tokyo.

 Morning provisions. Its a rice ball wrapped in seaweed, with beef in the center. Also comes in tuna, cheese, and some other flavours I'm yet to try.

 I made it! here I am in Shinjuku station (JR section) unwittingly about to take the wrong train to Tokyo...... good times!

 Ok so about 4 hours later.... everyone finds each other! there's Kalai and Sam, laughing at my travel misfortunes.... "Ohh haha that steve!"

 Harajuku! So the area itself is quite large but the fashiony street with the funny looking people dressed up is kind of localised to a small street. Kinda the equivalent to Kensington market except super nicer.

 The "Where's my wig" store or the "Oh wow, thats a drag queens heaven" store. take your pick. Funnily enough, almost no-where allows pictures to be taken in store. I was promptly told to put the camera away after taking this.

 Street in full swing!

 A shrine hidden behind the train station at Harajuku!

 Same shrine, quite lovely if you ask me, mhmm, it was!

 So lovely i took this picture!

 And that's me drinking a very large beverage. I believe it worked out to almost 2 litres. YUM!

 Just wandering the streets of Tokyo at night. I think this was Shinjuku,

 SKYTREE!!!!!! ok, so I was kinda meh about Skytree at the start cause it we basically have one in Toronto, CN Tower What WHAT! and we got there at 9:00 am. We had to line up to get a note which told us when we could come back and line up to buy our tickets.... We had to come back and join the 1:30 group, so we walked around, tried to go to a planetarium, went to starbucks.... came back and lined up at 1:30. We didnt get up until close to 3:30-4:00 but........

 Totes worth it. The Skytree was only completed earlier this year, and the lines to get in are crazy, so I guess we are fortunate to go up so early in it's history. The view was amazing an Tokyo is freaking big! Take that view there, and pan it 360 degrees. Its a LARGE city.

 Chillin out, maxing relaxing.

 More for Nicola and Michelle. SHAKEY'S PIZZA!

 This was dinner that night. Chicken and burger, with veggies, rice and soup.

 I dont remember why I took this shot, I guess I felt it very typically asian.

 I bought a book, it was wrapped in plastic. ITs the new Naruto Movie!

 I opened it to be slightly saddened..... Where are all the manga-ish pictures. It's not manga...it's a book :-\

 This isntantly made me feel better! Hot and Juicy! I didnt eat it. just thought it was neat.

 Later that night I went dancing with the girls! But oh no! No Dancing Allowed!!! Japanese police are currently enforcing and outdated law which was put in place during the post WW2 era to curb down the prostitution an solicitation that was rampant at the times. Why they've started enforcing it? who knows.

 So the above Picture is a train station in Tokyo pre-fireworks. The Right picture is a shot of said fireworks. They lasted 1 full hour! it was really amazing.

 That's my friend seal. He likes to swim upside-down. And I'm ok with that :)

And with the aquarium as the last stop on day 6ish ..

IT'S OVER!

I hope you enjoyed my Tokyo experience.

I've been slack I know

Ok so I've been slack,

I have been a little slack in the blog posts, but im still here and still safe.

Basically my last month has been mostly getting used to how the company and school run and operate things. I've been finding where things are kept, learning how to do my lessons and so on. Pretty standard and normal stuff when starting a new job. (The photo above is my school staff)

So that being said, I've also been kinda exploring a little on the weekends. Last weekend I went to Osaka, which is about 45 minutes by train, to kinda see the city and go watch the new Batman movie. It was good, but man movies are really expensive in Japan. Almost $24 just for entrance. We didnt have to go to Osaka to see it, but why not make a day of it, and that was a lot of fun, expensive but fun.

The rest of my weekends have been spent pretty much either in town (Itayado) or going downtown (Sannomiya). On friday night I actually met up with another NET Cheryl who I was in training with and we went to Sannomiya for a drink. We ended up finding a festival, which was super neat and super Japanese cliche. Everyone was wearing Yukatas,which are the more traditional style dress for guys and girls. And its pretty common to see people just casually walking down the street in one. They are usually worn for something or an occasion of sorts, and the best reason to describe it would be to equate it to your "Sunday best". In anycase that was a really fun surprise!

As far as work goes, its been really good. At the moment I'm still finding the hardest classes the Baby classes. And Baby class means children 6months - 1.5 years. These kids are still uncontrollably drooling.. These classes are done with the mommys present, so its not bad, and you're more actually teaching the mommys the class with the babies jut interacting when they want to. Its fun..just not my best or favourite. I am though, really liking the older groups of classes, so both the floor classes where the kids are around 5-6 and they know things and can actually enjoy the class, as well as the table classes where the they are able to kinda talk and make conversation. Those are fun. :-)

Other than that, The Olympics have been going on and I've been getting a lot of Judo, and soccer feeds. I've been keeping up to date on everything else via facebook news feeds and am really glad that Team Jamaica is cleaning up where they should be :-D.

(Neat clothing store name )

(I went to china town with Cheryl and Michelle)

(America town in Osaka)

As a final note on this one, we are having our first week off, break next week, and I will be meeting some of the other NETs from training and will be going to Tokyo! I'm excited to say the least it should be a lot of fun, and lets hope I dont get lost at the bus station!.

 -Steve-