So today is Sunday but let me start out by saying that this weekend has been anything but uneventful! Yesterday morning I was woken up by 2 moderately strong earthquakes! Although I am not really scared by them it doesn't make for a very good wake up...especially when I am not a morning person at all, and it was my day to sleep in (they hit about 7:45am)!!! Please believe I thought my husband was trying to wake me up early and I was fixing to curse him out when I realized it was an earthquake and not him. LOL.
Then this morning although I did get to sleep in (at least compared to yesterday) I was forced to get up and get Olivia out of her crib, even though my husband was already up and showered and everything! I was hoping he would let me get some extra sleep to make up for the sleep I missed out on yesterday. Boy was I wrong!!! If you know me you know that I don't play when it comes to sleep and when I feel I have been robbed of my sleep I get really irritated! So needless to say I woke up on the proverbial wrong side of the bed.
I was tired and irritated, and most importantly feeling under appreciated for the work I do Monday thru Friday and on some weekend days too. I felt like, "I get up with this baby every day of the week even when I am sick, tired, just went back to bed after a middle of the night feeding, etc. etc. and he can't even appreciate me enough to let me sleep a little bit longer and go get Olivia?!" And yes I was snippy to him when I got up and got her a bottle and changed her diaper and fed her. No worries I soon got over it! Needless to say when I got the chance I got up and took a shower and got ready to go. We decided to just get on the train and go to Tokyo Station and decide where we were going to go from there.
Well we made it to Tokyo station by train for the small cost of 720 yen or about $9.38 per adult. Not bad for a train ride into one of the biggest cities in all of Asia. Plus it took about 2hours to get there. You can't really be mad at that. We learned a few things. Tokyo station is the hub of central Metro Tokyo. Thats where you can catch the bullet train (known as Shinkansen in Japanese) and the bullet train is fairly expensive and when traveling across Japan is about equivalent to a Southwest airline ticket lol. You can also catch the train to Narita airport from there which is nice because Olivia does much better on the train than she does in the car and inevitably no matter how short the car ride is to the airport it is always a several hour ride home so Olivia has only taken that ride once (let me tell you that was the worst car ride with her ever). Also we learned that Tokyo station is not as cool as we thought and next time we are more likely to go to the stop before it and go out and explore Shimbashi instead.
Ok so after we got to the station we were starving since it was well passed lunch time and I hadn't really eaten anything all day and Kareem had a protein shake for breakfast. So first thing first we had to find some food. Just our luck there was a "food court" just off the platform. Sadly enough there were waiting lines for every place and we were starving. We got some "take out" from a place and went downstairs to eat. I got rice with some beef and mushroom sauce. It wasn't bad but it was far from my favorite, but I was so hungry I could have eaten pretty much anything at that point. Kareem had some chicken sandwich that was pretty good. Then we decide we are going to wander through the station and if we find an exit then we will go out and see whats outside but it was so cold outside that we had no intentions of forcing Olivia to endure the cold even though she had on clothes, shoes, a coat and a blanket and the stroller completely covers her. Plus we didn't want to endure the cold either. So we wander and eventually find an exit. We go out and end up at some random mall that we explore. Kareem decides he is starting to get hungry and we start looking for another place to eat but we decided to go home and eat anyway since Kareem had beautifully marinated a tri tip cut at home. After several hours of exploring we go back to the train station and start our trek home. We tried to purchase tickets for the reserved section of the train but since neither of us speak very much Japanese and as expected, the Japanese don't speak much English things weren't working out very well. But we made it back to Yokohama station where we changed trains and headed home on the express train. (We were now very hungry again so we were trying to get home as soon as possible.) just as we were about two stops from ours Kareem started receiving text messages from some of the guys he works with who were talking about the earthquake that just hit. Earthquake? I didn't feel anything. The train didn't stop nothing happened and all the other passengers on the train were completely oblivious to any earthquake.
lol. However, I did find out from a friend of mine from law school who spends a lot of time here in Japan that usually if the earthquake is strong enough the train stops and everyone must get off and walk to the next train station or the conductor may let them stay on the train while the train tracks are inspected to make sure there are not problems in the track. I am so thankful that we didn't have to get off the train because it was so cold outside I don't know that I would have made it (and I had a winter coat on over a sweater). Plus I was taking the train so I didn't have to walk, and we even drove to the military parking lot and walked the two blocks to the train station so we wouldn't have to make the 20 minute walk to the train station from the gate (not to mention the 10 minute walk from our house to the gate). Either way I am just glad we didn't have to get off the train and that the train didn't even stop. It seems like Japan has an "earthquake season," just like Florida has hurricane season lol. And well, now is earthquake season.
After we got home I cut up some sweet peppers, onions and mushrooms and put them on skewers and drizzled some grilling sauce on them and then cut up some veggies for salad. Kareem put the tri tip on the grill and then put on the veggie skewers. His tri tip turned out perfectly. It tasted delicious! He is getting to be quite the grill master! To which I am so thankful. Although I love to cook anytime I don't have to is great! We had a wonderful home made dinner that I look forward to him cooking again!
After dinner I got the pleasure of my husband bathing our lil Olivia and then putting her to bed. This is a rare experience for me but one I enjoy.
So we had a random day in Tokyo but one well worth it and filled with fun and excitement and I look forward to doing it again soon!!!
To all my readers, thanks for your support and to all the new readers thank you for your time. Keep reading and stay tuned for the next post of The Real House Wife of the Navy!
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