Rough Draft

Excursion

Around noon on Friday all of the Cupertino and Sunnyvale areas lost power. People in my group generally hung around until 1, at which point we decided we might as well leave for the day. Getting home took some time with a few of the traffic lights being out. The power was out at my apartment as expected, but was back on by 3. My friend Ricci still didn't have power, so he called Andrew and I around 4 to ask if we wanted to make a trip to Japantown in San Jose with him so he could pick up the board game Go. I didn't know there was a Japantown in San Jose, so I figured that would be fun to explore.

What Andrew and I came to discover though was that Ricci didn't really know where it was either. One of his co-workers drew him a crude map with the general area of a store he had been to several years ago. Needless to say I was a little skeptical about the existence of this store or Japantown itself. Fortunately, Ricci did have a map in his car, so after some searching we stumbled onto Jackson, the road his co-worker had told him it was on. And sure enough, when we turned onto Jackson there were banners on the street lights saying Japantown. We passed many Asian and even a Mexican restaurant before actually seeing any stores that seemed Japanese.

Eventually we passed one shop which had a very amusing T-shirt that had "Shitake Happens" written on it. Then we came across Far Out Toys which had a bunch of anime action figures, posters, and music. We also got directions to a store which might have Go. After stopping in a store with anime videos, we got to the store with Go just as it was closing. The owner did let us come in though, and got the game for Ricci.

On our way back to the apartment, this car with black lab sticking its head out the window passed us. It was the dog that first caught my eye, but then as it went past I saw the highly amusing bumper sticker on the car: "My Labrador Retriever is smarter than your honor student."