Today started slow like a lot of this week has. It's to be expected when Manami just wants to spend time with her family. Especially because she doesn't get to see them very often outside of Skype. Breakfast was more of the same. Lots of fruit and vegetables. A bowl full of the grilled whole fish as well. Manami's mom had to leave for work as soon as we were done breakfast.
After cleaning everything up, I noticed that Amada responded to my emails. I will be able to attend their tool show on Saturday morning. They have a hotel on their property for Amada guests only, so I'm staying there on Friday night. They'll give me dinner, breakfast, we'll do the tool show, then also lunch before I leave. I guess they want us to buy a million dollar machine.
Next up, I've cemented plans to meet up with a friend from a message board while in Tokyo. I'm going to check out the "nerdy" part of Tokyo (He might be able to join me there), and then we're going to meet up and go to this really nice beef/steak restaurant for dinner. I'm a big foodie, so that sounds awesome to me.
We went to the bank today, so I swapped some of my USD for Yen. The trade rates are great right now. The best they've been in 8 years. I should probably throw a "Thanks Obama!" thing in there for how shitty our dollar is doing. Anyway, Yen:USD = 1.06:1 So they're roughly 6% ahead of us. The bank kept a few % for themselves, but still a lot better than a standard currency exchange. I ended up getting 1.0303:1 from the bank, meaning they kept .0207 of each Yen. Not bad.
After we finished up at the bank, we went to Mos Burger. It's a generic fast food place, but the quality is significantly better than McDonald's. My burger was meat, cheese, tomato sauce and diced onions for $3.40. Yes it was fast food, but really good fast food at that. It was a messy burger to eat because the tomato sauce & onions kept dripping off of it, but it was still great. Here's a link to my burger. I only looked it up because I wasn't sure how to spell the name of that place.
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When lunch was over, Manami went over to the Hair Dresser to get her hair done. She prefers the way they do it in Japan, to those in America. Something about how they do the cuts or whatever... I don't try to analyze it too much. While she was getting her hair done, I stayed back at the house with Natsumi. We watched Frozen again, then went and played outside for a while. After that, the two of us walked to the Dresser so that Natsumi could get cut as well. Manami died her hair dark brown again, then also got a perm. We ended up cutting 3-4 inches off of Natsumi, making hers much more manageable. I really like how it turned out. It'll definitely be a lot easier to handle every time we go to the pool.
Following that, Manami made dinner for everyone. That way it was easier on her mother when she got home from work. After dinner, we talked about the train schedules I would need to know for getting to the tool show. Looks like it'll be 3 different trains to get there, so it's a little confusing. Fortunately, the train stations have people who speak English to help me get where I need to go.
In other news, Manami's dad is excited for me to go to the show, just so he can hear how it was. Amada is popular in Japan, apparently.