Busy Busy

This morning mom called me at 6am... ugh... I went back to bed until 8. It was almost 10am when I reached Baba, but that was ok as a lot of shops do not open that early. The first thing we did was exchange money at the Mitsuitomo bank right next to the Sunroute. We had a bit of a problem with "fixing" the form. You see, on an official document, instead of signing your name, Japanese have a stamp with their name on it. Apparently by law, when you screw up one of these documents and then fix it, you have to stamp where the mistake was. It took a couple of times before I figured out what the bank teller was telling my mom to do. Finally we got it.

The next stop was Shinjuku to get Shinkansen tickets. Once we finally figured out where they sell them at, it was extremely easy to buy them. I was disappointed that they would not give me a student discount... Our train leaves at 6:30am tomorrow morning!

After all this we made our way to Asakusa. We shopped for a couple of hours on end picking up various gifts for everyone back home. I think by the end of the day we managed to get something for everyone. You guys will just have to wait and see! We also visited the main temple, saw the Kaminari-mon, and generally wandered the streets. For lunch we ate at this Chinese-family restaurant. They had a drink bar which was really nice. I had a tofu platter and mom had an eggplant one. Delicious! It was really funny to watch mom shop for stuff. She is still working out the coin and bill values for buying things. It is also really funny when she speaks in plain English to everyone and they reply with Japanese. I had a few good conversations with the store clerks about that.

We eventually made our way back to Baba to drop stuff off and finish off a couple of loose ends in the shopping department. I was not really that hungry so we hit up a cheap ramen shop down the street. Again, the food was amazing. I swear the only reason I wanted to visit Japan was because of the food :)