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July 21, 2004

Chinese imports

I'm still waiting for all the pictures to come back to me, but for now here are some from Sunday the 18th. We got back home around 8AM from Motown and and a Yoshinoya breakfast, but both Felicia and I ended up waking up around noon. We went to meet up with Dan and their mutual friend Brad.

Dan took Felicia and me to get some "recovery ramen" after a long night of binge drinking. The other kid is Brad '04.





and then went with Brad to see fireworks at the 148th Yokohama Port Opening festival. Yokohama is the large port just outside of Tokyo that was opened following Commodore Perry's expedition in 1856 (am I right with the date? I know it was under President Fillmore...) It was such a luck that we had been told about this festival by the two guys we met at Motown that early morning. They live in Yokohama and told us to get in touch with them there.
Japanese summer festivals are crowded, but still pretty orderly affairs. A lot of women and some of the more intrepid men dress up in traditional summer wear (I believe it is called Yukata):





Brad had to go meet up with his other friends in Shibuya, but he left us in capable hands with his other two friends, Mimi and Aya. Mimi goes to Williams and Mary and is Chinese (technically Taiwanese) and is working in Tokyo for the summer, while Aya lives in Japan:
















The display (I believe it was advertised as 6,000 fireworks) was one of the more impressive I've seen in my life. Aya had to leave during the fireworks, but the rest of us went to meet up with Naoki and his gang (the ones we had met at Motown). We walked about 30 minutes to this huge mall with its centerpiece being an 'O|O|' store. Felicia told Naoki to meet us at "Oi Oi", making the common mistake of not realizing that the O|O| was a logo and not an English phonetic spelling. That was amusing. Naoki took us to one of those Japanese restaurants where all the tables are in private stalls. We sat around talking (part Felicia and Mimi talking to them in Japanese, part me writing out Chinese/Kanji, part Naoki and his gang speaking in Engrish, and part all of us in the universal language of swear words - I taught them 'shitforbrains' and they taught me 'chou umai', Japanese for "it's fucking good"). By the time we checked the time (and 4 Asahi beers later) it was midnight and the trains were shut down already, so all of us went back to crash at Naoki's apartment. More on this later:



Posted by rxu at July 21, 2004 11:53 AM

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