9:16PM 1/1/2000. Hope everyone has had a great new year. Well, looks like the rapture never came. ;) The entre world is in 2000 for two hours now. Boy that's really strange! My whole life has been this timeline with the right hand side as 2000. But now that's here and it's really funky. I got out today and sent email, plus talked to Molly for a bit. It was funny talking to her, me in an entirely different year and all. :)
We left the hotel and took the various trains back to Shinjuku where we took the elevator to the 45th floor of Toochoo, one of the tallest buildings in Japan. The view is fantastic; we were in the left tower. We were looking for Mt. Fuji, but a guy came by and told us that you really couldn't see it more than about 17 times in a year. We took the elevator back down and walked back towards the station area, looking for somewhere to eat. Most everything was closed, so it wasn't an easy task. We finally found an open McDonald's, and each ordered different meals, or "sets". We decided we wanted to go to Ueno Park, since there wasn't much else open to do. We jumped on the various nearly deserted trains back to Ueno and exited the station. However, both Pat and Cyndy smelled something like "melted chocolate" and decided to return to the train station to locate the source of it.l They bought some sweets and snacked on them while walking. We headed to the park again., stopping to make a few phone calls to family in the states, as it was after 3PM, and New Years had happened for Texas. In the park, we noticed these terrible black birds that were huge and reminded us of the crows in Resident Evil 2. They cawed the same way and were huge and scary. We visited a temple where we wandered around and had some neat armor contained within. We headed back out and found some other dome-shaped building that we weren't sure what it was. Down the way they were selling grilled yams that looked very yummy. We went down a hill to another temple, then out to the lake in Ueno park. There we found dozens of stands selling all sorts of different foods: grilled squid, okonomiyaki, grilled corn, yakitori, sweets, octopus balls (the male octopus has eight
Casey, Cyndy and I got food at the convenience store, and since there's nothing open anyway, we're just staying in and watching TV tonight and getting some rest. We're all a little burned out, which is why Pat's sleeping on it.
Tomorrow we're going to try and go to the Imperial Palace, then it's off to Kyoto.
Hikaru