Dec. 31, 2011 - First full day in Japan

Well, we were evicted this morning from our sweet suite. :(   On to the regular room for us - just like the riff-raff we are.

We hung out at the hotel for the morning, enjoying our last moments in the party suite.  We then headed out around lunchtime for the Asakusa area.  This involved our first trip on the subway, though not Drew's first trip since he was here on business a few times this fall.  So far, the subway seems easy enough to figure out .  After exiting the subway, we headed toward the Sensoji Temple.  Many Japanese visit a temple around New Year's as part of their New Year celebration.  The main street leading to the temple was quite crowded, with many shops selling souvenirs and Japanese snacks.

The kids each received about $50 worth of yen from their grandparents for Christmas, and it's burning a hole in Cooper's pocket.  I originally wrote "in their pockets," but Greer disagreed with that assessment and requested a rewrite.  However, they were BOTH quite interested in the souvenir stands.  We convinced them that they had plenty of time to buy souvenirs since we're living here for a year and a half.  No need to add to our huge stack of luggage while we're still in the hotel - souvenir shopping can wait until we're in our home.

We sampled several snacks as we walked along the main street.  We can't tell you what any of them were since we had only Japanese characters to go by.  The first was some type of dough ball with a meat and onion filling (we think).  We all liked that one.  The next was some kind of rice thing on a stick - it struck out with all four of us.  Then we tried a rice cracker flavored with soy sauce (we think) - nothing exciting, but we all ate it.  Then came some pastry-type thing with a sweet bean paste filling.  Jen, Drew, and Cooper liked it, but Greer deemed it "too sweet."  We think that was her way of saying she didn't like it, but she just insisted it was "too sweet."  We found it hard to believe her when the next snack we tried was a giant meringue-type cookie, quite sweet, and Greer ate most of it.  We wish we'd thought to take pictures, and then we could have found out later what everything was called. If we happen to see the various snacks again, we will be sure to take a picture!

We made our way to the temple.  We weren't quite sure what some of the Japanese people were doing around us, and no signs in English.  Maybe we'll be able to google it to find out.  At midnight on New Year's at the Buddhist temples they ring the bell 108 times.  We weren't going to be sticking around for that since we were still all pretty jet-lagged.  Then we decided to find some food  besides street vendors for a 3:30 meal ("linner?"),  and we headed into a small (6 tables and tiny chairs) noodle shop.  We can't remember the names of the various dishes we got,  but they were all pretty good.  We should have written the names down so that we could remember them.  All of us have a long way to go in our chopstick work.  I guess that's one way to lose weight.

Here are some pictures we took near the temple:

We had to work to keep the kids up until 8:00.  Hopefully just a few more days and we'll be adjusted.  Drew, lucky guy, adjusts pretty quickly to new time zones because of his amazing ability to sleep anywhere, anytime.

Japanese word of the day:  ichi   (click to hear pronunciation) means "one"

Greer picked "one" because it was our first full day in Japan - I think I know what she wants the next nine words of the day to be.