Better than Riverdance

I finally got the 'tourist' thing out of me today. Had the day off so Adam, myself and a couple of girls from our apartment went to Asakusa to see the various temples and whatnot. It was fairly interesting but I have absolutely no idea what the significance of these buildings are so it really didn't mean much to me. They must mean something though because the place was a tourist trap. Far too many white people for my liking anyways. There were hundreds of little stalls all selling various overpriced souvenir type items that I had absolutely no interest in.

One of the odder (is that a word?) events of the day occurred even before we entered the temple area. Just outside is a place where people like to stand and get their pictures taken with the temples behind them. A group of japanese girls were standing together and getting their picture taken. Adam, who has no shame, gave his camera to one of our friends and then went up to the girls and asked them to pose with him for a photo. They were all tickled by this and seemed to enjoy it thouroughly. They then left only to return a minute later cameras in hand wanting to get their own pictures of this meeting of western and eastern civilizations. So we all jumped into the photo while my friend had to take pictures with about 8 different cameras.

It took me about 8 seconds to pick up on the trend of everyone giving the victory sign to the camera and start using it myself, probably for now and the rest of my life.
We saw another odd thing at the end of the day while walking through Ueno park (you can see the Ueno station at the top of my blog I think.) Around the main square of the park were groups of highschool students dancing. There was no music, just groups of people, still in their school uniforms practicing some kind of choreographed dancing that was something like a cross between the videogame Dance Dance Revolution and line dancing. I swear it was one of the strangest things I've seen in my life.

Fortunately one of my friends managed to grab a short videoclip of it with her camera so I'll try to host it here or at least email it to anyone who wants to see it. It's really quite interesting and is probably worth the download even if you have no male hormonal desire to watch dancing girls in school uniforms.