Gonna be a long day.

I'm at the junior high right at the moment.  In about 50 minutes, I'm scheduled to start the first of my classes for the day.  The teacher I'm with tends to be a little bit difficult in the classroom, so it's always interesting. 

On Saturday, Jun and I went to Asakusa to meet her parents.  Asakusa is really freaking cool.  So much of Tokyo looks exactly the same, and it has this tendency to just kind of melt all together, visually, but Asakusa has this old-school noir vibe that I haven't felt anywhere else.  The streets are wider and the buildings are older, and it has this beautiful, enormous shrine, complete with pagoda, at the end of a long, outdoor market, carefully lit up with rows of the most beautiful lamps.  Around the shrine are a number of open-air restaurants, one of which we went to and had beer and sake and lots of Japanese snacks, which I can't currently remember the name of.

So, first we met up at the Kamiya Bar, a famous bar housed in an extremely rare pre-war building in Tokyo.  It's fair to say that most Americans aren't aware of this anymore, but Tokyo was firebombed viciously during WW2, and very, very little architecture survives as most of the city was burned to the ground.  More people died in that single firebombing than at either Hiroshima or Nagasaki.  So, old architecture just basically doesn't exist here, which is incredibly tragic just on humanitarian grounds and also personally problematic, since I am a known and epic architecture-phile (thanks Dad).  The good news is that many shrines were rebuilt in the classic style, but most of Tokyo's western influenced architecture, of which there was *a lot*, is simply gone forever.  Kamiya Bar is one of those old buildings, though.

So, we met at Kamiya Bar and had a couple of drinks and then headed out to explore Asakusa.  First stop was the shrine and outdoor market.  The market is sandwiched between a couple of massive gates, which are particularly popular in Japanese and Korean tradition, and probably Chinese, as well, although I'm not familiar enough with China to say definitively.  Asakusa is really popular with tourists, so there were lots and lots of foreigners (but mostly Japanese, per usual).  Second stop was at the outdoor bars and more beer, snacks, and some sake.  Last stop: a really nice little soba shop, and then back to her parents' place.

Sunday night was shabu shabu, which is kind of like fondu, but with more veggies and a very light broth instead of oil.  Somebody sent Jun's dad a bottle of really freaking expensive sake, which we cracked and imbibed freely.  We're talking Dom-priced sake here.  God help me, I'm going to be a massive sake snob when I get back to the states.  Guess I can add that to beer and coffee and my other little proclivities.  *sigh*

As usual, the trip was great for my Japanese, since Jun and I speak English about 70% of the time, and her parents were really nice to me.  As usual, listening is the big problem...I can generally communicate more or less what I want to, but understanding the answer is usually a nightmare.  I'm doing my best (頑張っているよ).