White Day

Yesterday was White Day.  Here in japan they have two types of Valentines Days the first one is on Valentines day and it is when the girl gets the guy a present.  The second one is on March 14 and that is the guys chance to return and give a gift to the girl.  It is normal for the guy to get a gift that is two or three times bigger than what the girl gets him.  Normal gifts would include chocolates, especially white chocolate, candy, jewelery or white lingerie.

There is a shortage of power in Tokyo so the country is doing scheduled black-outs in different areas.  We were supposed to have one yesterday and possibly everyday through April.  It never happened yesterday though and it is hard to figure out what is going on because we can't read Japanese.  The trains also got shut down to save energy.  At first I wasn't worried about this because we can always ride the bus in town.  When we tried to ride the bus into town we were wrong because two buses passed by and they were so full they didn't let anyone on.  I could see the people pressed up against the doors and each other I didn't know if I wanted on anyway.  i think the mall is about 2 miles away so we just walked it yesterday.  Unfortunately all of the stores and about 2/3rds of the restaurants in the mall were closed.  the grocery store was also very low on food.  We can get food on base so i wasn't worried about running out of food.  I am just worried about being stuck in our apartment day after day with nothing to do and nowhere to go.  I really hope things are up and running this weekend but I have no idea why the stores are closed in the first place and I have no way of figuring out when they are going to open back up.

We ended up eating at one of the popular crepe restaurants and even though i thought a crepe with meat and lettuce on it might be gross i was hungry and it was pretty good.  I also got this pop drink with ice cream in it.  Just like a root beer float but with a lot of ice and you can pick any flavor pop or ice cream.  Penelope did spill her cup of oj all over the table in the food court and i didn't see any napkins or towels around to clean it up.  I decided to ask the guy who made our crepes because he was speaking English to us.  "do you have a towel?" i said and he said "towel, no.  Dish rag, yes." After which he handed me three Kleenexes.  they barely made a difference on the mess.  Bob and I had no idea what else to do and although we felt really bad we ended up just leaving it.

About an hour ago Bob emailed me and said that the kids and I should close the windows and stay inside all day.  I guess the wind has changed and there are now concerns about radiation. I think it is worse today because the wind is blowing toward us.  Its probably not a big deal but we would rather be safe than sorry.