This morning I had the most boring kind of adventure possible: the Immigration Office Before 9:00 style of adventure. Amazingly, it was breezy and easy and beautiful -- so much so, in fact, that I decided to take a bike ride to Tachikawa, running errands the whole time. It was a lovely fall day and the western Tokyo suburbs were still wrapped up in the silence of morning; 10:00 a.m. is a magic weekday Japan time when everyone is either at work or school or doing the laundry and stores aren't open quite yet. It's quuuiiiiettttt. So I kind of had the streets to myself. And suprisingly my sense of direction has improved dramatically since the days of yore (thanks, I guess, to the necessity presented by the haphazard construction of Tokyo's urban and suburban infrastructure), so I failed to get lost even once. Amazing!

Yesterday my friend Aya and I went to Fuji-Q High Land, home of what was once upon a time the WORLD'S TALLEST COASTER, amongst other things. It was super super fun. And freeeezing. Brrr. Anyway, I've included a picture of us after riding FujiYama (not to be confused with FujiSan aka Mt. Fuji) for the fourth time and feeling like we were about to vomit generously. Nausea aside, we were glad we made it out to the enjoyable trappings of a rickety, rural (Yamanashi), earthquake-prone, Japanese style amusement park. Once in a lifetime, they say.