Japan – Day One

Aloha, everyone! Well, we completed Day #1 here in Japan and it was awesome as always! After arriving late Thursday night and with only 3 hours of sleep, we began the Aloha Yokohama weekend with two performances here in Minato Mirai. I was so surprised and happy to see many of our fans who came out to welcome us back to Japan – they are the absolute greatest! I’m always so amazed and humbled by the tremendous show of love and support that my boys and I receive at every performance … we are truly blessed to have such great fans!

And of course, the food is great as always! My favorite meal while in Japan is breakfast – most of the hotels here serve buffets and they are all quite good. It’s so weird because at home I hardly ever eat breakfast – just my beloved Dunkin’ Donuts coffee – but here, I pig out every morning! Go figure …

After our last performance, we went eat ramen and gyoza at one of our favorite places, Ippudo Ramen. There’s nothing like a hot, steaming bowl of ramen noodles, fried gyoza (dumplings), and a big frosted mug of nama (draft) beeru … man, I was I hog heaven!! We also ran into our good friend, Hiroyuki, who generously bought a round of gyoza for all of us – mahalo, Hiro-san! After that, I barely made it back to the hotel before passing out from exhaustion …

Today is going to be a rough one – we have four HTJ (Hawaii Tourism Japan) performances at four different venues – and two of them are outside! I haven’t gone out this morning, but I heard that the heat and humidity is supposed to return today – damn! It was quite nice yesterday – in fact, it was cooler outside than in the buildings! But if the heat & humidity comes back, I’m gonna die … especially at Bay Quarter which has to be the hottest place in Yokohama! I mean, the stage is located in an area that has absolutely NO moving air of any kind, it’s enclosed with clear plastic so that the sun beats down mercilessly, and finally, the hot stage lights are so close that I feel like a chicken being roasted! But most of all, I feel sorry for the poor dancers – the stage gets so hot that they literally get blisters on the soles of their feet! Pretty bad ….

I heard that the new Mac Air laptops came out … cant wait to get one so I can stop using my iPad for all my blogs and emails. Can’t stand the touch screen typing ….

Aloha, “D”