Thanksgiving in Tokyo

I arrived in Tokyo last night (Friday), which turned out to be Japanese Thanksgiving Day, which is something more akin to the American Labor Day. I took the Narita Express straight from the airport to Shinjuku Station, an absolutely huge train station which services more than one million people each day. It was a bit overwhelming, and I'm glad he met me there as it would have taken me a while to figure things out.

His wife had reserved us a table at a restaurant for Thanksgiving dinner, and it turned out to be a very traditional American Thanksgiving meal. Turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, even pumpkin pie! Turkey is not indigenous to Japan so it had to be imported. I was kind of expecting to have Japanese food, so this was a welcome surprise since I had flown out early Thursday morning and didn't have a chance for a Turkey dinner back home. The one funny part was that the waiter put down a plate of food in front of me, and I kept waiting for him to come back with plates for the others before digging in. It turned out that plate was the food for all of us! So the portions were Japanese-sized, even if the food was traditional American. :) We were all having such a good time that we forgot to get a picture.

Today we will take a day trip to Yokohama, which is a harbor town just south of Tokyo. Several people had told me they wanted to see it, and apparently there's a big aquarium there that my hosts had been wanting to visit so it works out perfectly. Hopefully I'll have some good pictures to post at the end of the day!