Sunday July 11th

Tokyo Tower & Edo-Tokyo Museum

Today was the trip to the Edo-Tokyo museum, which was interesting, and then onto Tokyo Tower. The Edo-Tokyo building was quite impressive, with a large open floor space outside and a *huge* red space-style elevator going up into the main area.

There was also a really interesting tile pattern outside that looked like giant fingerprints. Inside was loads of stuff about the Edo period in Japan, but far more than I could take in properly. I bought my dad some ukiyo-e style artwork and myself some nice letter writing paper. It’s quite difficult to find good letter paper in England that isn’t all commercialised. Lianne also bought a weird ‘Edomaru’ key ring, which looks like a fat little caterpillar with bulging eyes ^^;. Greg, Shaun and Simon had their pen friends; Miki, Chiyo and Asami walk round with us today. I got to speak a little Japanese with them, but I meet my pen friend, Ayako on the last day at the Ghibli Art Museum, so hopefully I’ll get to talk more then. The view from Tokyo Tower was good, but by far the funniest event of the day was the strange American(?) guy we met while Mr. Irving was trying to take copious amounts of photographs of our group at the top of Tokyo Tower. The guy kept trying to make us all laugh by poking Mr Irving’s head and doing odd gesticulations. We met him again in the lift and outside where he did some hilarious voice impressions and went on to give Mr. Irving ‘Tinkerbell’s Pixie Dust (small, shaped Mickey Mouse heads) and call himself Santa Claus. Weird, weird guy ^_^;. We had a ‘Sakura’ and ‘We Will Rock You’ rehearsal in the evening (which Lianne organised really well), but left everyone a bit stressed out. I then had to write the speech in preparation for the visit to Tsurumine High School. Wai-sun and I went up to see if Miss Kushida would translate it for us (this was 11pm at night) and she was really moody (and for good reason), so she made us go back to my room and had me go through it and she translated it as I went. I was exhausted and irritable afterwards and Wai-sun was forced to stay in the room the whole time for translation purposes, because I kept miss hearing Miss Kushida. The speech got written in the end though, but today was quite stressful, with Lianne’s upset earlier in the day as well…