I was alerted some time a few weeks ago that I would be spending the night at a friend of my host family’s house during an upcoming vacation day. Apparently they were thinking about having a foreign exchange student stay at their house in the near future and they wanted to try it out. Granted, I knew the family because we played tennis, but it felt a little like I was getting rented out.

In addition to the mother and father, there are three kids in the apartment — part of the same complex as the apartment room I live in. The oldest is 12, there’s a 9 year old and a 6 year old boy. I get a kick out of the youngest, Taisei. He always wants me to play Beyblades (which is like Battle Dreydel) and seems to idolize the celebrities who appear on variety tv shows over here. He’s even trying to develop his own ippatsu gags (what the heck is that?) Despite being almost violently energetic, he is never obnoxious. It’s a very subtle distinction that I would love him to teach the 7 year old girl at my homestay.

The night was fairly typical. Dinner, then TV. But when the husband came over, he was very talkative and asked me a ton of questions. I’m not sure what his job is, but he does a lot of business trips and he’s been more places in America than me. We were trying to figure out what to do the next day, so we sat around a guide book of Tokyo and tossed out some ideas. It mostly became a Tokyo history lesson, which was fine by me. I didn’t particularly care where we went the next day, but I was interested in learning about interesting places I could go by myself sometime.

The next morning, me, the mom (whose name or possibly nickname is Baba, although I feel so weird calling her that because that’s slang for “old woman”), three kids and the oldest girl’s friends. In the morning we went to a karaoke parlor. I didn’t foresee karaoke in the morning to be that much fun, and it certainly didn’t reach the heights of the last time I went during a class party last semester (where I performed Lose Yourself in front of my class and teachers. Yes, really) but it was still pretty fun. Baba didn’t sing, Taisei just liked to yell into the microphone, the second oldest girl was really shy, but the oldest girl and her friends enjoyed themselves. I attempted two Japanese songs, but mostly relied on the safety of Weezer.

After karaoke, we headed over to the Science Museum in Ueno park. In addition to a lot of interesting looking and impossible to read exhibits, there was a short movie that was shown inside a giant sphere. There was a glass walkway in the middle of it and the image was projected 360 degrees around it. It was very cool and only slightly nauseating.

Then we had lunch at an Udon restaurant. Next, we headed to Asakusa because the “Edo Period Parade” was going on. The parade consisted of a ridiculous amount of people dressed up in Edo-era costumes with the occasional old man acting like Shimura Ken. And then it looked like the parade organizers recruited every American they could find to play the part of Commodore Perry’s men. The crowd actually applauded when they arrived, which I didn’t expect. Were they applauding the good sport gaijin, or were they applauding Commodore Perry’s forcible opening up of the country? I’m too tired to speculate right now.

After the parade, we hit up Nakamise-dori again. The last time I went, it was fairly empty. But this time, it was as crazy bustling as I expected it to be. I tried out this one food, the name of which I forget at the moment, that was balls of mochi lined up on a stick and dipped in a flavored powder. The powder had a tenuous grip on the mochi at best and exploded off on contact with my mouth, making it a poor choice for a meal when entertaining potential clients.

All in all, the day was very nice. I’m leaving some details out, I’m sure, but it was a pleasant excursion where I was able to forget about school stuff and not looking like a tourist and enjoy Tokyo for once. I also have to mention that the weather was unbelievably clear that day. I thought that being able to see Mt. Fuji from Toyko was perhaps possible before the industrial revolution, but not today. But all day, Mt. Fuji was easily visible with the naked eye. This means that I now have my first picture of Mt. Fuji that I’ve taken yet. It’s not great, but it’s something.