My friend, Natsu-ko, who I met in America, is back here in Japan and she lives near Shinjuku so I called her up and she showed me around.  She's going to school to learn how to teach Japanese.

On one side of Shinjuku station are some very large new buildings.  In the building on the left are two very large department stores, about 40 restaurants (every department store has restaurants on its top floors), an IMAX theater, a 2 store Sega Joypolis, a 6 story bookstore and a few other things.

That's Shinjuku station on the right in the first picture.  There are tons of stores around most big stations and Shinjuku is the largest station in Japan (maybe the largest in the world)  There are something like 80 separate exits.

We stopped to have a drink.  These small drinks were 800 yen each ($8).  Ugh!

This is one of the government buildings in Shinjuku.  Shinjuku is a part of Tokyo and Tokyo is the capital of Japan.

There is on observation area on the 45th floor of each tower.  Here's the view

Across the street is a park.

On the other side of the station is an area known as Kabukicho.  It's famous because there ara lots of sex shops, strip clubs and stuff like that.

And on another side is Shinjuku park.  My friend Masumi brought me here.  I reminds be a little of Central Park in New York because all around the park are tall buildings.

These are some weird kind of trees.  I'm not sure how they grow and if they are baby tree's or just parts of the big trees around them.

Here are the same trees looking up.