I was out sick on Monday. When I woke up, I had the irresistible urge to show myself my dinner. Sharron twisted my arm and in to the doctor I went. I thought I had the flu or something, but the doctor suspected Appendicitis. If Sharron wasn’t staying with me, he would have admitted me to the hospital for observation. Instead, he told me the list of symptoms to watch out for and told me to come back immediately if any of them appeared, or Tuesday morning if they didn’t. None of the symptoms he was looking for ever showed up. Instead, I starting producing large volumes of fluid from my nose and sneezing a lot. I drank some fluids and stayed in bed all day. When I went back to the doctors Tuesday morning, the nurse that saw me asked me when my last eye exam was. When I told them it had been since 2002 he made me get one right then. This morning I went and saw the optometrist. By Monday I’ll be wearing glasses. 20/40 in my left eye. 20/50 in my right eye. My eyesight isn’t bad enough to get me laser eye surgery so I’ll have to wait a few years for that. They don’t do contact lenses here, but he said I could go to any place in the states and get them, so I’ll be doing that over Christmas break. You can image my surprise at all this. Fun fun!
Monthly Archive for November, 2005
After a busy week last week, it was nice to have a 3-day weekend. So nice in fact that we didn’t do anything on Friday except lay around. It was just was we needed to get our energy back up. Saturday was a different story. Sharron and I decided to go out and do some hard-core shopping. This included a trip on the train to Tachikawa to see what we could see. The best part of the trip was good ol Patrick being the cause of much laughter from Sharron. We walked to the train station, and as we were getting close I was happily blowing bubbles with my bubble gum. A sudden gust of wind caught a truly magnificent bubble and it went soaring. A helpful, but unsuspecting, Japanese man was very nice and picked up my bubble and handed it back to me. We’re still not sure if he knew it was bubble gum or not. :-) After picking up a Christmas tree and groceries at around 6pm, we headed home to relax.
Sunday was much more exciting. Our plan was to hop a train to Motsumoto castle and take a tour of it. Little did we know how long it actually takes to get there (2.5 hours). We decided to amend our plan and try somewhere closer. Our destination became Mt Mitake and the shrine that is there. The mountain used to be worshipped as the god of agriculture, and the shrine is there to welcome all the pilgrims wishing to pray to this god. We had to take 2 trains, 1 bus, 1 cable car and 4 feet to reach the shrine, but a couple of rest stops later we’d made it. Pretty nice place really. It was especially nice to be out of the city for a few hours and up in the mountains. Lots of green and few buildings. I took some pictures and if I can get my home internet to cooperate I may add them to this post tonight.
My sister has been in Japan doing some site seeing and gave me a call to meet her for dinner on Saturday night. Sharron and I decided we’d make a weekend out of it, so we made reservations at my sisters hotel and made out way into the city. Saturday was most nice outside so that was a big bonus. We got into the city in the late afternoon and had a couple of hours to look around before dinner. We also kept our eyes open for good looking restaurants. We met up with my sister and her friend Karen at 6 pm and told them about some of the places we were interested in. Stacey looked pretty uninterested and told us she’d made reservations at an Italian place. Italian…in Tokyo… Ok… So we went, and we ordered, and we received some…interesting dishes. Not quite what I was expecting. Mine was a little flat pastry with some cheesy stuff and shrimp in between. It was almost good. Oh well. After dinner Sharron and I headed up to the room and watched a movie. I know, pretty boring.
On Sunday we busted out our train passes and did some more shopping. We headed to Ueno to this big toy store I’d read about online. It was 6 floors big and full of all sorts of toy goodness. I mean really, I was in toy heaven. The most exciting things were these little boxes or bags that cost about 100-300 yen apice that each come with a little figure or something in them. You don’t know what you’re getting beforehand so that adds to the fun. I’d bought some Transformers figures a few years back in this method, so I was already keen to the idea, I just had no idea how many different kinds of figure lines they did this for. The ends of the aisles had display cases with some of the older lines they had. I was quite sad some of them were no longer available. Ah well… I ended up buying some Star Wars M&M figures and a few packs of the surprise figures. Not bad considering the amount of money I *wanted* to spend. There were surprises around every corner. :-)
We next headed to the electric city in Akihabara. I’d been wanting to do some more exploring there and find a couple more toy stores. By the time we’d spent a couple of hours in the Ueno toy store though, we were getting tired (Geez! Are we old or something?). We decided to hit just a few places and then head home as we still wanted to do some more supplies shopping around the base (Sharron still needs a coffee maker).
Overall, it was a good trip into the city. The rail system has gotten easier to understand now that I’m the one that has to pay attention. It really did seem mind boggling when I was just blinding following people around. Most everything is in both English and Japanese, so that helps a lot.
So on Saturday I hopped on the bus to Narita Int’l Airport and picked up Sharron. We were super happy to be together again and were treated to an extra long bus ride for our troubles. :-) She’s still a little discombobulated time-wise, but I’m sure that after a week here she’ll be better. I think she’s still a little worried about a great many things, but I’ve told her everything will work out and not to fret. I doubt she’ll listen to me, but I’m going to keep trying to reassure her. :-)
Anyway, we haven’t done too much yet, but we have been eating some Japanese food (I know, Finally! :-). Haven’t found anything that I would say was the bestest ever, but we’ll keep looking. :-)
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