weekend

Kawagoe festival: Pretty fun. Not the best weather for a festival, since it was rainy and very, very windy. My umbrella succumbed to the Bernoulli principle at one point. Other than the weather it was a lot of fun. Due to a lack of communication between the JSPers, few people planned to meet up for the festival, yet we all ended up finding each other at some point. I set out from Kawagoe-shi station and used my ever-improving Japanese to ask the station agent how to get to the place on the flier I had. He pulled out a map and ushered me in the right direction. I ended up finding it easily. I lost my keitai strap somewhere in the streets of kawagoe though.
First, I happened up a very long line of very old women in matching kimono dancing to taiko drum music (one of the drums was played by girl who was probably about 7, she was awesome.) Further down the street there were old men dressed up in refurbished samurai armor. This was really cool. These guys fired old rifles. There were these business men, suits and all, standing in the crowd next to me talking about one of the samurai (clearly a friend of theirs) and how his glasses didn't fit in with his costume. The called out to him about it and he stifled a laugh. I was amused.

Then I went into Tokyo with my friend. It was cool. I bought a shirt at a cool t-shirt store and speaker for my ipod. It's about 2 inches long and half an inch wide, looks like a lego and plugs right into my ipod. It's really loud too and powered by the ipod. Oh Japan. I bought it at Kiddyland, which blew my mind, more or less. It's a huge store full of toys, tech stuff, cute stuff, socks, cookware, random stuff. It was a lot of fun just to look around.
We went to Akihabara to the huge electronics store. When I say huge, I mean 8 (or more) floors in a huge building, jam packed full of every electronic device you could ever dream of. I bought one of the new lime green Nintendo DSi's (only to discover you can't put it in English or use R4 on it, so I'm going to exchange it for a less pretty but cheaper and more useful, old DS. It's so pretty though...