A Japanese Mexican Festival

Like I mentioned in the last post, food is definitely the thing we're missing most here (except our grocery store is now finally carrying oatmeal and bratwurst! Just no tortilla chips and salsa...) So when Chris mentioned that there was a Mexican festival going on in Tokyo we had to go! The festival is held in Odaiba which is a man made island off of mainland Tokyo. I had never been before but for Chris and Brad it was a return trip. Odaiba kind of has a similar relationship to Las Vegas in terms of extravagant buildings and attractions, as well as some good shopping.

A replica of the Statue of Liberty with the famous rainbow bridge in the background. (Really colorful huh? I'm not sure why it's named that...)

The Mariachi Band

We were dancing to the music... 

After we ate at the festival we went and walked around the huge mall that was right next to us.

Creepy doll exhibit that was going on at the mall.

Then we headed to a huge Toyota dealership that's also attached to the mall.

Brad taking a reaction time test. The lights blink and you're supposed to push the button before the time runs out.

One thing that we love about living here and definitely will miss is not having a car!! I remember freshmen year I missed driving my car so much because that's the only place that I could sing. But now since we have karaoke, I don't have that problem. :) And it is so nice to not have to worry about insurance, gas, etc. And we don't have to have a DD. The trains are so convenient here and even when you have to be on them for a while the time flies by. Japan also has the cutest little cars! Everything is so much smaller here but there are really very few sedans on the road. There are either minivans (which are actually quite high tech and possibly even bigger than minivans in the US) or they are little hatchback sedan/mini suv type things (think Nissan Cube, Honda Fit, and Toyota Yaris--except there are way more models here than are available in the US). When we went to the Toyota dealership, which is more like an interactive museum/ shop, they had a test track, cars on a ferris wheel type thing ready to be tried out, and all the models of the cars open to sit in/check out, plus some futuristic cars...

Behold--the cars of the future....

I'll post everything on Picasa but it was a really cool place!

Next we saw our first monkey in Tokyo! Japan has monkeys all over the place but we had yet to see one...and we still have yet to see one in the wild. I think we'll need to wait until winter and then go to an onsen (hot springs) where they like to hang out. We have a few videos so if you want to check out the others just go to our youtube page. 

So it was a pretty good day. We got to have some Mexican food, see some cool cars, and see our first monkey in Japan!