Friday, Japan Day 4, 7/19/13:

Damian left for Mt Fuji with a group of Japanese Survivors from Over Cancer Together, a group of Japanese survivors whose mission is to unite Japanese people in the fight against cancer.   Sadly, I wasn't physically ready to take on this epic challenge so I stayed in the hotel and met up with old friends and new contacts from Japan.  I took a cab to Harajuku and met up with Mike Kato from Japan for LiveStrong for lunch.  He took me to a new type of restaurant: A Japanese “pancake” restaurant, an Okonomiaki.  You cook your food yourself at the table, very similar to the Korean BBQ.  Instead of grilling meat, you cook little “dough” chips of tempura batter and mix it with random stuff.  Meat, veggies, chicken… I’m sure you could think of more stuff.  I put kim chee and beef in mine.  So good.  Mike is a Japanese-American in Japan. He grew up in California and relocated to Japan.  There we ran into a bunch of Junior High kids having lunch.  They really liked the Tumors Suck sticker!  We snapped a group photo after our meal. Mike helped me flag down a taxi back to the hotel.  I crashed for a bit till I met up with my friend Josh for dinner.  Although it was relatively close to the hotel, we took a cab there! We ended up going to another skewer place in Roppongi.  This one was cool because they served bacon wrapped chicken and bacon wrapped shrimp!  It was interesting because we had to take a tiny elevator up to the third floor to get to the restaurant.  Then I had to park the mAss Kicker Mobile outside in the lobby and do an assisted walk to sit in the actual restaurant.  Josh handled all the ordering because I didn’t want any other raw chicken surprises!  HAHAHA! After dinner, we checked out the streets of Roppongi.  It reminded me of visiting one of the burroughs in New York City.  Tokyo is a huge metropolis like New York where people dress to impress and take public transit BUT everything is clean/everyone is so polite!  I need to learn more Japanese.  “Domo Arrigato”  is one of the few Japanese phrases I know. We ended up just walking back to hotel after we soaked in some evening sites at Roppungi.  10 years ago, I may have wanted to go out and check out the night life, but a "wiser" Galvez-San knew there was much to be done the following day and I didn't want to deal with all the curious stares at me in the mAss Kicker Mobile!  On Saturday, I'd get to meet up with another old college friend in Tokyo and scavenge for food at night with Damian.  

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Stay tuned for more updates.  We will be blogging throughout the trip.  Please consider a donation to help us spread our message of post treatment “thrivership”throughout Japan and the Pacific Ocean.  Click here to support us and stay tuned for the next update.