Day 2...

Another exciting day come and gone.  We met Honda-san yesterday morning and he took us to City Hall where we got started on some paper work to get our foreign registration cards.  It was quite the process as we had no idea what we were doing, but Honda-san was very helpful.  After filling out the first round of forms we went and sat in the waiting area and much to my excitement the Red Sox/Yankees game was playing on a huge LCD TV.  JACKPOT!!!  The announcers were speaking Japanese but it made no difference to me... it was baseball!  After finishing our registration forms we went to the bank, which was in the same building, to set up our accounts and then we went to lunch down stairs in the basement.  We were a little hesitant because we were about to eat foreign food... from a cafeteria... in a basement!  From all the knowledge we had to draw from this seemed like a bad idea.... but as Audrey and I have been saying since we landed "when in Japan do as the Japanese do."  We literally had no idea what we were grabbing aside from the tofu Audrey picked as one of her side dishes and some rice. Thankfully my mystery meal ended up being sweet and sour chicken, potato poppers, rice and miso soup while Audrey had beef stir fry, tofu, rice and miso soup.  By the end of the nine of us Americans were all saying that we would eat at this cafeteria daily if possible because it was so "oishii"(delicious).  Once we finished lunch we explored the area around the city hall building for about an hour and then headed to the port to get our re-entry visas.  After we finished filling out those forms we headed back to our apartment around 4 p.m.  After hanging out for a few minutes we took a long walk to the max value.... a three story Japanese shopping extravaganza.  The top floor was a 100 yen store (like a $1 store) where we got a bunch of "stuff" for our apartment.  Then we headed down to the grocery store which was extremely overwhelming... but so much fun!  We will take pictures next time... this time we were on a mission to find meals for the next couple of days.  We ended up with a cart full of groceries... most of which are still a mystery to us... but the pictures looked good:)  Last night we had some dumplings for dinner and they were fantastic!  We still are not sure what was in them, but that is probably a good thing.  We even cut out the label from the package it came in so we can get it again sometime.  After dinner we showered and crashed at around 9:30.  We have been so blessed not to have experienced much jet lag at all.  We hope all is well in your neck of the woods and look forward to hearing from you soon.

Josh wearing the loaner glasses for people who need a little help with the small writing on the forms at the port... He looks a little bit like Mr. Potato head:)

Lunch!?!?