Today's entry is provided by guest blogger, Monica

Julie's a little bit tied up at the moment, so I've been asked to guest-write a spot on the blog. It's a lot of pressure, but since Julie is doing all the heavy lifting on our project work, I guess it's only fair that I pitch in here.

It's been one week since our return to Tokyo from Hawaii. Every day is a challenge, best summed up as a series of events that are classified as either wins or "loses."

Top wins:

1) Every morning, breakfast is a lot like Russian Roulette. Enter the local convenience store and head back toward the refrigerated section where they have an overwhelming array of packaged foods. Some packaging resembles things we have back at home, like yogurt and juice boxes, other items have only Japanese writing on them or an English phrase such as "Calorie Mate" and nothing that indicates what type of dietary situation the product would be appropriate for. Yesterday's game of Japanese Food Roulette was a "lose": Julie went in for what she thought was a fruit salad, but actually ended up with something that resembled canned fruit cocktail suspended in clear gelatin. Yum. However, this morning we had a WIN: Not hating our Japanese Roulette selections of the day: some type of chocolate flavored balance bar thing and cantaloupe yogurt.

2) After a very long day at work and a workout at Gold's Gym, we were both very excited to try a restaurant called Rainbow Roll Sushi, purported to serve "Western" style sushi: California rolls, Dragon Rolls, Spicy Tuna Rolls, etc. After studying the subway map and making a few poor navigational decisions, we finally found Rainbow Roll Sushi only to discover it was closed for renovation. Frustrated, we set out to find somewhere else to eat and stumbled upon Food Magazine, Tokyo's answer to Whole Foods, where we sat outside and had a decent meal of mini pesto pizzas, green salad, and screw-top Shiraz. [A quick aside... the grocery store didn't have plastic cups for the wine, so we resorted to emptying out our water bottles and drinking wine from them. Julie commented "Brooks would DIE if he saw us right now, guzzling $13 screw-top wine from water bottles." And my response was "No, Brooks would be proud-- he would understand that you gotta do what you gotta do."] Dreading our 7 block schelp back to the subway station (each of us carrying two bags containing: laptop, power cord, notebook, work files, umbrella, iPod, cell, assorted cosmetics/toiletries, gym clothes and sneakers), we debated whether we should take a $30 taxi ride home or suck it up. We then realized that the shopping carts here do not have anti-theft devices on them (crime is practically non-existent here), so we decided that the perfect solution would be to "borrow" the shopping cart and use it to push all of our stuff to the subway station. We had a minor setback when Julie overturned the cart crossing the street and dumped the entire contents onto the sidewalk. No worries, we ignored all the strange looks and glares and quickly scooped everything up and continued to the subway. WIN: Not getting arrested for borrowing the cart and safely depositing it at the entrance of the Roppongi Hills subway station.







3) We rode the coolest roller coaster last night...Tokyo Dome's Thunder Dolphin. It goes 80 mph and does a 80 degree vertical drop (yes 80 degrees, as in... almost 90), then it whizzes you through the center of a hubless ferris wheel and through a hole cut out in the side of the building. WIN: Not dying on Thunder Dolphin.









Top "loses":

1) While in San Francisco last weekend, Julie purchased a cool new pair of kicks from Cole Haan and wore them to work on Monday. After work Monday, we went to Gold's Gym near our client site for our first proper workout in Japan. You have probably heard that the Japanese are pretty persnickety about wearing street shoes indoors, so many establishments require you to remove your shoes before coming inside. Gold's Gym is one of those types of places, requiring shoe changes that would give Mr. Rogers a migraine: remove street shoes, put on "locker slippers," remove locker slippers and put on bathroom slippers (if you have to visit the loo), remove bathroom slippers and put locker slippers back on, remove locker slippers and put on running shoes...finally you are ready to work out. It's certainly no wonder that our friend Julie might have lost track of her Cole Haan shoes. At home on Tuesday morning she discovers that the left shoe is missing and decides that it is either: a) at Gold's Gym or b) on the sidewalk near Roppongi Hills (see shopping cart story above). Sherlock Donaldson-Holmes takes a digital photo of the right shoe and hopes to use it to identify the left shoe with the non-English speaking Gold's Gym staff. Tuesdsay afternoon we returned to the gym with Kawaguchi San, our project principal and translator. After much un-decipherable back-and-forth in Japanese, it was "regretfully offered" that it would be "difficult" to recover the shoe. LOSE: the new shoe.






2) Lunch time at the client cafeteria is interesting to say the least. It's a typical cafeteria-style setup, where you grab a tray and peruse a selection of hot food and some pre-made sandwiches. But most of the hot food is traditional Japanese-- ramen or soba noodles, tempura, pickled vegetables, grilled meat, etc. On our inaugural visit to the Aeon cafeteria, we were pretty happy to see that there was a spaghetti bar-- your choice of meat sauce or pink tomato cream sauce. I opted for the tomato cream sauce and for a second wondered why they garnished the spaghetti with shredded, dried seaweed. Well, it should have tipped me off that this was not your ordinary "penne a la vodka." They actually take a bunch of orange colored fish eggs (tobiko) and mix it in to the pink sauce, giving the spaghetti a really weird fishy, oceany taste. LOSE: my lunch.

It's been fun being the guest blogger, but I promise that you'll have Julie back next time (I think she is super busy right now planning her August vacation to Bali).