Tokyo Break

Hi Everyone!
This week Cliff took us to his and Marg's home in Tokyo for the long weekend. He said we could use a break, and I agree. I feel that a big part of doing a short-term mission trip is to enjoy the culture you are immersed in for the time being, and since we haven't had many opportunities to do so yet this weekend was a real treat :) Because Cliff and Marg were gone for the first 2 days of our stay in Tokyo, Josh and I decided to take over the city on our own. We were quite impressed with our public transit skills, as we only took a wrong train once. We found lots of parks, free museums, interesting shops, and some very delicious food in some small, obscure restaurant. On friday afternoon cliff took us to electric city, the dream of every electronics junkie, nerd, and computer whiz in the country. Basically it is like the strip in Las Vegas, but instead of casinos, there are computer, camera, appliance, and gaming stores as far as the eye can see. This leads me to an interesting aspect of Japanese culture. In Japan there are approximately 1,000,000 "hikikomori", these are young men who basically spend their entire life indoors on their computers, and have no social life except that obtained online. It is a very interesting and very sad subculture, and Marg lent me a book about it that I am currently reading.

Some other things we did this weekend was: Take a ride in a rickshaw, which, embarrasingly enough was pulled by a young woman who did it as a part time job. Josh and I felt a little awkward being pulled around by a girl, but hey! at least she spoke english! Marg took us on a boat ride down the river, led us through the old black market (which is now an open market) through a touristy section of the city, and finally to the memorial for aborted babies. This was a very sobering experience for me, because they have hundreds of little baby statues set up with brightly colored clothes on and pinwheels in their hands. Just seeing these hundreds of snuffed out lives (a fraction of the actual number) was almost too much to handle.

On sunday We attended Cliff and Marg's home church, and were very warmly welcomed. Marg translated the message for us on paper, so that was very helpful. After the service the young people invited us to have lunch with them. They took us to the convenience store, and we let them pick out food and drinks for us, which, for the most part were delicious. Good job people!

In closing, sunday evening Josh and i went up the tokyo tower to admire the city at night. To our dismay we forgot it was valentine's day, and so you can imagine who the majority of people in the tower were. It was spectacular despite this slight annoyance :)

Pictures soon to follow

-Flo