Earthquake

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St Patrick's Day Parade

Today we went to the St Patrick's Day parade in Omotesando. Omotesando is the Sloane Street of Tokyo but on a much larger scale - it has every luxury brand you can think of and each shop is absolutely massive. Considering the price of property in Tokyo you'd be forgiven for thinking that maybe the designers charge so much for their products just so they can pay the rent on their Tokyo retail space.

Anyway the St Paddy's Parade was great fun - there was everything from the traditional (baton twirlers, Irish dancers, leprechauns, U2 tribute, walking pints of Guinness, penny whistle players, Irish wolfhounds and red setters) to the more tenuous (French Bretons, Japanese bagpipe players, and

Here is Aoife pretending she is in the parade - waving her flag and doing a twirl.

Cherry Blossoms

We've had a busy day today - we went to Shinjuku Park which is apparently one of the nicest parks in the city. Tokyo is just about to enter cherry blossom season which is a big thing for the Japanese. Shinjuku park has hundreds of huge old cherry blossom trees so in a couple of weeks it will be pink blossom as far as the eye can see which will be amazing. I just love cherry blossom. We found one tree today that had already blossomed and there were loads of people taking photos of it. She had a great time running around the park.

Needless to say she had a great time running around the park. She gets lots of attention from the Japanese women I guess for being blonde/foreign - in fact one girl was trying to take a photo of her today in the park with her phone but I don't think Aoife stood still long enough for her to get a picture.

Aquarium

This weekend has been a bit cold and wet - we went to an aquarium yesterday. There seem to be several in Tokyo so we just went to the nearest one but it was v good. It had this big tunnel you can walk through so you're surrounded by all the huge fish (sharks, rays etc) and Aoife was fascinated. She kept saying "wow!" and "wow-wee!". They also had penguins and all other kinds of weird deep sea creatures and we managed to keep Aoife awake for long enough to watch the dolphin show which she absolutely loved and was smiling and clapping lots :) In the evening we met up with Victoria and her husband David for dinner at their gym/club place again and Aoife had a very posh tea with her own little jelly dessert in a tiny mini plastic martini-style glass. Of course she didn't eat that but instead was scoffing the dry chocolate cheerios that I had in my bag as back-up snacks. We didn't get back until after 8pm so Aoife has had a monster long lunchtime nap today and in fact is still asleep - nothing will seem to wake her! We're having a lazy day in the apartment eating lots and watching movies.