(Carisa, Ellie, Amanda, Sammy)

The train ride was roughly a half and hour but it felt so much quicker than it was. But when we got off I was quickly reminded that this is a city, not the small town of Flagstaff I'm use to. There are people everywhere going about their business. Getting back up onto street level we went ahead to our first destination; the ferris wheel on top of HEP (a mall that holds major brand name stores).

The ferris wheel ride was amazing and really cheap to get a ride on for such a huge ferris wheel. I remember the London Eye being a big pricey but here it was cheap and just as wonderful. The sights were grand, seeing how far the city stretched out and all the different types of buildings. In the "container" I was in, Julie and Sammy were with me and we discovered a wonderful device. There was a mp3 player hook up to play music which Sammy thankfully had to see if it would work. And it did. The theme song for the ride (which was roughly 20 minutes long) was A Whole New World from Disney's Aladdin; the perfect song for the situation.

After the ferris wheel ride we ended up stumbling on the food floor of HEP, and who could resist a bit of ice cream? We sat down and ate at this waffle ice cream shop that was set up beautifully. There were colors everywhere and the food was absolutely delicious. One of the best ice cream order I have ever had; "Maple."

Ellie and Carisa had ordered quite a sight too though. They had ordered Cinderella something and when it came out everything was in a glass slipper. An actual glass shoe filled with ice cream and other sweets. It was so surprising that all of us were muttering "Sugoi..." (Amazing; cool).

After filling up our stomachs our journey continued. We lingered in the mall for a small time since everything was expensive and made it outside after five floors. Eventually we wandered into an arcade which was absolutely addicting. The arcade had three levels; first floor was the crane machines that were filled with cute stuff animals and other goods such as anime figures, accessories and etc. Second floor had various types of games but we spotted something that everyone in Japan loves to do. Purikura!

Honestly Purikura is so addicting. It's like the photo booths in America but so much more fun. The space is bigger to allow more people to join and you take up to six different photos. After the photos are finished the fun begins. You step into a side booth after your photos and decorate the pictures with writing, drawings, and stamps covering the photos with whatever you want. The booth also makes your eyes slightly bigger and skin clearer in the photos.

Once Purikura was done we just ended up wandering around the arcade for the rest of the day, eventually moving to another arcade before deciding it would be best to return back home and get ready for registering at city hall the next day along with a campus tour. Back tracking was easy enough and return onto the train.

To make things interesting Julie suggested playing a game in the mean time. It was a simple enough game using your thumbs. Basically you count how many thumbs of the people playing so if there was two people there would be four thumbs. The idea of the game is you call out a number from 1- to how many are playing, and when you call out the number you choose to stick your thumbs up or not. If the number of thumbs up is the number you called then you get to take a hand away. The goal is to get both of your hands out of the game.

We only played one round and catch the attention of some of the occupants on the train. The ones I notice the most (because they were in the direction I was facing) was an older woman who looked around forty and a younger male, possibly a college student, who were rather amused with our game. I think the woman was more amused while the young man looked like he couldn't believe we were playing this, he even shook his head slightly when Ellie accidently messed up by calling a number that wasn't being used.

All in all it was an awesome day. And there's a plan for another trip to Umeda with more people.