Kate's Visit, Day 1

Kate set a fresh-off-the-plane record by staying up until 11:30pm and sleeping until the late hour of 8am. Future visitors, this is the standard to which you will now be held. It being the precious weekend, Sam stayed in bed a few hours longer while I took Kate to Shibayama Park, in the southern end of the town where Sam and I work.


"Is that bamboo?", she asked. 


The local pagoda. 

After the park visit, we met friends in Ikebukuro (NW Tokyo) and caked all we could cake. No pictures from that, unfortunately, but all five of us felt like we were falling into insulin shock within a half hour of sitting down. It was wonderful. Our final activity of the evening was a rather strange dance performance in western Tokyo. The theater we were in only held about 25 people safely, and there were 40 or so in the audience, so it was cramped. I kept thinking to myself, "the fire marshall in Oregon would shut this place down in a second", which somewhat detracted from the experience. The dance itself would be pretty hard to describe. Maybe Sam or Kate can do it justice. Anyway, that was our Saturday.