Day 12

Happy happy statue guys!!

Sometimes when you play concerts in a ghetto pavilion, you move heavy equipment by ..pulley.
Our cute lil' venue!

Chinatown in Yokohama!

YOOOOOOOOOOO-Kohama where the sun comes driftin' down the lane!!! (Are those the words? I'm not very Oklahoma literate...sorry!)

There were a lot of jellyfish in the river. Unfortunately, my thought turned toward "Seven Pounds" immediately and it made my stomach warbly.

This one's for you, Diane! We're alive and happy!!

Let's Familing, everyone! (Whatever the heck that means. Yay for badly interpreted church material!)
Forever 21 grand opening in central Tokyo, everyone! Hooray for Orem, Utah locations!
I love to see the temple. Im going there someday, you know.

Today was the day of Yokohama.

And yes, all day i was thinking of ways to fit the word "Yokohama" into popular tunes! (the hallelujah chorus, for example: YOoooookohama!! Yoooookohama! Yokohama! Yokohama! Yoooooooookooooohamaaaa!!! Or, the Barenaked Ladies "Yoko Ono": You could be my Yokohama! You could be mine wherever i go!!..Or the typical "Oklahoma": YoooooooooooOH! -KOhama where the sun comes ...something somethin' eeeelse!!!!)

Anyway - it's a quaint lil' town...and by lil' i mean it's pretty massive - about a 40 minute drive South of Tokyo. It's freakin' European there. We watched Tennis for a while and took pictures by the ocean and saw tons of skyscrapers and ivy covered houses alike! I mean..WOW, guys! Everyone i know would love it here. We ate lunch in Chinatown in Yokohama. Wrap your head around this little treasure - - we left South Korea to fly to Japan to visit Yokohama to eat Chinese food. RIGHT!? Talk about culture overload. They said that the way people in Japan really treat each other - like our hosts treated us - is to take them out to Chinese food. I thought that was pretty cool. I didn't think it was as cool when everyone at my table dared me to down an entire glass of some sort of Chinese-style tapeoka pudding. Kevin said "Hey Liz, i'll give you a dollar if you fill your glass with that stuff [complete with white creamy substance and pasta-like beady-shaped ball things] and down it!!" I said "..Okay" (i mean it's a dollar, right? Who wouldn't?) and i proceeded to drink it. I didn't take into account the fact that a consistent feeling of those squirshy balls flooding down your throat is anything but pleasing. I couldn't finish it. Another boy at the table, Zach, offered to finish the 1/2 that was left if i'd split my 100 yen with him. I accepted. I also had the taste of tapeoka in my mouth until dinner.

Dinner was a doozie. I think those who fed us thought it was American food. It was a club-like sandwitch which was ...interesting..with french fries and two things that LOOKED like cream puffs (yay, dessert, right?) WRONG. They were cheesey curry ball things. Yeah, shocking, i know. Then, as we were finishing those meals up they randomly brought out these sausage hot dog things on a stick. We were like..er...thanks? They sort of tasted like Polish dogs, but we had a hard time eating them all because we had just finished the other stuff. Shiesh!

Anyway, we saw the Tokyo temple, visited the Yokohama church building, as well as the first catholic church that was established in that area. We also played another concert tonight. The venue was the worst we've played in yet. It was very run down and a little trashed. I think it was a community center of some sort. Down the hall from where our dressing rooms were there was a big Bingo shindig going down with a lot of beer and a lot of smoke. It made me laugh. I got to sing my solo again tonight which was probably the best yet! (sorry i didn't get it on camera, though!) The best part was the ghetto microphone and sound box/amp/thing that my voice came out of just like..1% distort-y. HEhe. Good times.

My general impressions of Japan so far is that it's a TON more livable than Korea. In Korea it just feels foreign. Everything is in Korean (appropriately so, i suppose) and not many people speak English and there seems to be not much rhyme or reason to layouts of cities and towns and what not, but in Japan it's a lot more urban and clean and more English-a-fied and that's comfortable, of course. I could live here, i think. Not to mention, the climate is LOVELY. It's a lot cooler than Korea was and i'm diggin that big time.