TGIF!

The first week of class is over, and Friday night was very fun. I met up with a new friend I made, Reimi, who was our interpreter for our trip to City Hall. She and I went to Kichijoji (pronounced how it's spelled), and our first stop was a hammock cafe! This is the third type of cafe I've seen in Japan, the other two being cat cafe and maid cafe. This one is very cool - customers sit in hammocks and eat cake and drink milk or coffee. Unfortunately they would not allow photography in the cafe.

Customers sit in high-backed hammocks suspended from the ceiling. Two or three hammocks surround a small coffee table. The hammocks are free to move and swing about in. There are about 20 total hammocks in the cafe.

The menu was entirely in Japanese, so I'm glad Reimi was there to help me translate. Luckily the cake menu had pictures so I just pointed to what I wanted and used my nifty phrase, "Kore o onegaishimasu." (I'll have this, please.) Reimi and I both got what was similar to a lava cake, I suppose. A small chocolate cake baked into a creme brûlée dish with melted chocolate in the baked middle. It was so good - the melted chocolate part tasted like brownie batter. I accompanied mine with a glass of milk and Reimi got guava juice, which was also good.

:-)

After the hammock cafe, we went to an area in an arcade that had a bunch of Japanese photo booths. These are very popular in Japan. I went to one in Japantown in San Francisco, but this one was more involved. You take 4-5 photos with your friend, and the machine edits them to enlarge your eyes (by quite a lot) and smooth your skin complexion. You can then go to the editing booth and add stickers, words, dates, and other fun things and then the machine prints out a copy of the photos for you and your friend.

We then walked around Kichijoji and she introduced me to a new kind of dessert - taiyaki. It's basically a pastry, with a taste and texture similar to a croissant, baked into the shape of a fish with some kind of filling. The filling choices include red bean, chocolate, egg and cheese, custard, and a type of berry, I believe. Reimi got red bean and I got chocolate, because I wanted to make sure I'd like it the first time I had it. I tried some of Reimi's red bean flavor, though, and that one was good too. Mine tasted like s'mores. It was a lot of fun going out on the Tokyo town on a Friday night with a new friend I made here.

A street in Kichijoji (the entertainment district) at night. 

After we got back to school, my roommate Kim and I went all the way to Tokyo station (the last stop on the Chuo line) to return to that Mexican bar and restaurant, Mucho. We got there around 9:15 PM, so the place was already packed. After a bit, though, we got a window seat, which was really cool. The restaurant has a bunch of string lights hanging from the ceiling that slowly change from green to blue to orange to white. We shared a quesadilla, an enchilada, and chips and guacamole. It was a lot of fun.

This morning we were rudely awakened by a 5.4 magnitude earthquake! It was the most shaking I've felt, but it didn't last too long. Haha, it kind of reminded me of home.

Our seats last night at Mucho.