STOP THE AIDS!!!

As some of you might or might not have seen on my Facebook account, I went to a Penis festival last Sunday in Kawasaki and had a blast! I've tried to make the link available on my F-book site, but if you have trouble I might have to "invite you"- which is weird, but maybe safer for my personal info...

Anyway, so the Penisfest was pretty awesome and I had a great time at an African festival that Kenyetta, Michaela and I went to right afterwards. There was food from all over Africa (I got some hummus from Morocco, but no pita bread- WTF?), and some food from Benin and Nigeria- yummy! The Nigerian stuff wasn't as good as Tobore's, but beggar's can't be choosers, right? There was also an African band playing and shops from all over Africa selling cool stuff, some of which reminded me of that cool African import store in Adam's Morgan, DC. Then Michaela saw a Senegalese guy she knew, I got to practice my shitty French for a second, and then we headed to another part of the area to take some pictures. Afterwards we walked to the Yokohama Ferris wheel and accompanying park attractions and then we saw some Japanese guys practicing Parkour- AWESOME! For those of you who've never heard of it, one of the most famous people who has started a movement called free running (similar to parkour) was chased by Daniel Craig at the beginning of Casino Royale and his website can be seen here:

http://www.foucan.com/?page_id=75

Anyway, so we saw some guys in a bicycle parking area and they were jumping from bar to bar with each bar being about four feet apart and only about two inches in diameter- not one of them fell!

We watched that for a few minutes before strolling towards the metro- all in all a wonderful, but exhausting day!

Then the next day I met up with my fellow English teacher Luke and we explored the Botanical Garden near his house (he'd been there before), but the cool thing about this place is it is especially designed so that each month different parts of the park are in bloom or there's something interesting to see: last month there was a section of plum trees in bloom and this month the sakura (cherry blossoms) are blooming. There's even a firefly month! Pretty cool way to keep people coming back to your establishment...

After a stroll in the garden (and a hilariously creepy moment watching some carp) we went up one metro stop and Luke took me to this 100 yen sushi place. Now 100 yen is about 1 dollar, so that's pretty cheap for sushi and it was still pretty fresh, but the coolest part was there were two separate conveyor belts: the bottom one was the normal, run-of-the-mill conveyor belt sushi, but the top one (where you can order from a touch screen computer) was delivered via a mini-shinkansen! It was REALLY cute! For those of you who don't know, the shinkansen is a bullet train that seems to have a weird cult following in Japan and is loved by foreigners and Japanese alike for its Zen-like efficiency...so I've read anyway. It's expensive as Hell, but I will be taking it to Obama City on the 19th and 20th and will let you know if it's worth the hype. Here's a link describing it:

http://www.japanrail.com/JR_shinkansen.html

Anyway after that we went shopping at a store called Seiyu? (which turns out to be a subsidiary of Wal-Mart) and I bought these hilarious goodies:




Front:



Back:




Then we went to a wonderfully cool store called Don Quijotes and I found this odd beauty (it's a weird, but poignant hat with the fleur-de-lis on it considering the "Thou Shalt Not Kill" billboards all over NOLA when I lived there, although I'm not too sure who "IT" is supposed to be- a child called "IT" maybe?):





One last thing I bought from Don Quijote (and YES it's ALL what you think it is):








One for the road: a video I made from the Botanical garden: