Exploring Tsukuba

September 28, 2008 by Jeff · Leave a Comment

Today was the first full day in Tsukuba, of course, I like to call it Skuba, but that's just me. Anyway, today we spent the day basically wandering around seeing and exploring.

Italian Restaurant

We wandered around lots of Tsukuba looking for a convenience store located on our not-so-accurate map. While wandering around we found a Italian restaurant that we checked out. Note that the only way we knew it was an Italian restaurant was the fact that there was a Green, White and Red flag outside, otherwise it could have been a refridgerator shop to us for all we knew.

Anyway, once inside realize we were very under-dressed and ill-prepared to eat in a fancier Japanese restaurant. Too late now. We pulled out the handy-dandy Japenese-english translator book and asked, "What do you recommend". The waitress pointed to some random symbols and we said, "Ni" which means two.

What a great lunch! It was two very delicious fresh greens salad. As an appertizer (or appertif) they served persuito and grapefruit, some beef and green onion thing and a bruchetta. As a main course we had prawn and pesto fettucini, which was delicious. In fact, we even looked up the word delicious in the translator to tell them it was delicious.

University of Tsukuba Dance Team

The other thing that we stumbled upon was the University of Tsukuba dance team. They had a show outside of the Days City complex. It was totally impromptu thing and we couldn't understand a thing they were saying but was pretty fun to watch. I even took a video of it so take a look.

Sushi Dinner

Finally, we figued that we'd been in Japan for a whole 24 hours and it was about time for some Sushi. So, we went to the grocery store and bought a bunch of sushi from the store. It was soooo cheap and actually not bad, unlike the more expensive less tasty stuff that we have in Canada. The best part, suprisingly, was the sushi maki rolls... yum!

Besides those highlights we also made it to the Tsukuba Expo Center (which we're going to go to another day), the Q-t (giant fashion mall) and the international conference center (where the conference is happening). More tomorrow!