Friends on my 30th

There's nothing like being with friends and having a good laugh on your birthday. Our friend Cory, you may know him from our previous world-wide rendezvous' like Leiden, Holland and Sarajevo and Croatia and the Jersey Seashore and even Bangkok, came to visit us this weekend with his friend Amy. Cory is now teaching in Seoul, South Korea and I'm sure you'll be seeing more of him this year since we are close neighbors again.

For my birthday, we took the monorail out to Odaiba (doesn't this look so futuristic?), the island landfill in Tokyo Bay.

This chapel is amazing. Imagine getting married here with the city, the bay and the bridge spread out before. Curious about the cost of getting married here, knowing that rooms at Hotel Nikko are $600 a night, I looked it up. It's under $4,000 to rent the chapel, but the sample plan for the wedding they propose at Hotel Nikko rounds off at $33,000! Of course, that price includes a "fake" foreign priest to do the "Christian" ceremony for your pictures. It's very stylish to have a western style ceremony here in Japan even though they aren't recognized as official.

James found a grill restaurant featuring Australian beef that overlooked the waterfront, Rainbow Bridge and the Statue of Liberty. The food was amazing and the best part was this little dish they gave us that we could fill up with sauces from the condiment bar! Pink salt, anchovy and black olive tapenade, cassis mustard, cherry relish, yum!

The only downside of the restaurant was that they played the same song over and over for two hours.

Tokyo Tower and Rainbow Bridge in the background.

After dinner we boarded Jicoo for a hip futuristic cruise on the bay. I felt like I was in some crazy slow motion movie montage--house dj, laser lights, bottom lit dance floor, Jetson-like boat and Japanese people all around me.

I asked for this messy concoction for my birthday months ago. It's a grape hubba-bubba flavored (didn't know that) profiterole from Food Show. It's prettier than it tasted.