Thanksgiving & Getting Locked Up

Can't believe that it's already that time of year for the holiday season to begin. Hope everyone had an awesome Thanksgiving! Bern and I spent our first Thanksgiving here in Japan with our family away from home, The Cariaga's. We all decided to try out the Thanksgiving Day buffet at the New Sanno Hotel in Tokyo. Reservations were for 5:30pm so we thought this would be a great opportunity for us to do some sightseeing beforehand. Since J.R. is a huge anime fan, Bern and I took them to Akihabara which is the anime capital of Japan. He was so excited to see all the shops filled with Pokémon trading cards and anime figurines! After walking around for a few hours, we grabbed a quick Italian lunch and then headed to the Honey Toast Café for dessert. There are similar cafes in San Diego that serve these delectable treats but nothing to this scale. Bern and I tried their chocolate banana honey toast with vanilla ice cream...one of the best desserts I've ever had, no doubt! Really glad Kristine spotted this place as we were walking around Akihabara because now we can take visitors there to try it out for themselves.

After our time in Akihabara, we then boarded a train and headed towards the other side of town to the New Sanno Hotel. This is a hotel only for U.S. Military personnel so they had a special Thanksgiving Day buffet with over fifty American-style items on the menu....everything from the turkey, ham, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, & pumpkin pie was on point. Even though we miss all of our family & friends back home in SD, Bern and I are extremely thankful for having the Cariaga's with us in Japan. Our time here has brought us closer and made this experience even that much better. Happy Thanksgiving 2014!

 

 

The weekend before Thanksgiving, Bern and I got "locked up" at one of Yokosuka's newest restaurants The Lockup. It's a scary-jail themed restaurant that my friend, Ben (one of the guys in my Kali group) invited us out to.

 

 

 

This place carried the whole scary-jail theme to the T... Our table was in a jail cell with steel bar doors at the entrance, the wait staff were all dressed up as cops, and even the menu had some really cool science-themed drinks & food. It was all you can drink so we tried a whole bunch of these cool drinks. Thank goodness that Ben's girlfriend, Yugumi, is Japanese or else we would have been so lost in trying to understand everything. Had a great time and hope we get to hang out again soon outside of kali class!