so ends my first fabulous week in tokyo. i have a great place to live, great people to live with, a great new job and tokyo is alive with spring.

for the past 2 nights i've ventured into the hanami/cherry blossom parks with some of the flatties. thursday night we arrived at yoyogi park just as the rain started to bucket down, so we strolled around in the rain drinking beer and carrying guitars and looking bedraggled with stupid australian animal hand puppets and giggling like fools. the park had been jumping with small parties, stalls, buskers, drums and a mini dance party. but then the rains came. anyway, it was short and sweet but we vowed to make a second attempt.

friday night the skies were clear and 5/7ths of the household caught the train into inokashira park to sit on tarps by the lake and haul drunken friends out of afore-mentioned lake and drink more beer. again, the place was full of buskers and music and happy people. jeez, between the fujiyoshida sayanora parties and the hanami parties my liver is going to get ruined again. it's so damn nice to have a household of lovely cool people to come home to and hang out with, after living alone for 15 months.

it's a great time to be in tokyo, the place is just jumping with spring. the weather has (mostly) been amazing and everyone wants to be outside. i spent today at the beautiful shinjuku gyoen and took 150 photos. i had no idea tokyo had so many beautiful parks. really, really, really beautiful parks. huge, lush, diverse and smack bang in the middle of the city. there is even a cool not-so-little park just by our house, great for laying on a blanket and reading in the sun.

on the work front, i had 2 full days of training over at inage, in chiba, on thursday and friday. on the whole, a relaxed, laid back, fun, pleasant team. we had an official work party/dinner friday evening at an up-market izakaya, and met pretty much the entire team. they like to drink a lot of beer. yup. a lot of beer. most of them have been working for this company for a few years which is a very good sign in this city of high turn-over. my second interview for the part time job with the big company (ok, it's berlitz) is on monday evening. keep your fingers crossed for me.

i'll be spending the rest of the weekend trying to resist taking new photos so i can tidy up the backlog and load them into the galleries. it's going to be hard if the weather continues to be so gorgeous.