Japan - The Amazing Race

(This is so long!)

So as we were traveling through Japan it really felt like the amazing race, because you often ran into other SASers and we started to call them, and it was like who could do Japan the hardest, see the most, the fastest, the cheapest, it was really funny. We would run to just make trains and run up stairs and yeah, it was awesome.

So we docked in Yokohama and it was pouring, it took 4 hours to get through customs it was really intense, a Japanese delegation came onto the ship, took up 3 rooms and were typing all of our passports into these machines and cross checking them and all this stuff, and we were all thermal scanned (or heat scanned or something?) to makes sure our body temperatures were normal and that no one had a cough or sore throat or else you would be quarantined and not allowed in!

The amazing race started right away as it was a rush to get your passports and get off the ship, but once we had them we all had to stand in a long line for more customs. When finially out we spent some time walking around the city taking our time trying to find the proper place to exchange our vouchers for our much needed JR Japan Rail Pass – that allowed us to travel everywhere on the rail. Instantly my favorite part of Japan were these vending machines on the road that were EVERYWHERE. Haha we even once saw 2 in the middle of the woods! Like no road up to them, behind a fence and in the woods, vending machines! They were drinks but some candies, everything from canned koolaid, to waters, to little cute pop bottles, to canned cocktails and beer, for 120Yen or about 1$.

It took us a long time to find the right train station, we got lunch – pizza in a cone! Haha the cone was crust and inside was cheese and tomatoe and meat and stuff, pretty funny, as we snarfed it we realized we were the only people eating on the street, also everytime we used a vending machine we rarely saw locals doing it and never saw a Japanese person drinking (water or pop or alcohol or anything) on the street, though we were assured by some that it was ok for us to do it.

When we found the right place to get our cards it was filled with SASers, and just kept getting more and more packed, we all sat on the floor and traded around trying Japanese candy. After getting our pass we (we being me Jackie, Christina and Tim) booked it out of there Amazing Race style, we very much felt we were winning over all the loser SASers still stuck there, haha, but yeah and we got on a short train to Tokyo!

Tokyo was amazing, it was like being in Disney land kind of, stuff everywhere lights changing and ads and people and stuff everywhere and TV screens and noises, noises everywhere! Coming out of cars saying stuff (that we obviously didn’t understand) and from buildings and… it was nuts. We got lost trying to find our way to the district we wanted to stay in but eventually found a hotel – “the Prince Hotel” near Tokyo Tower – which looked like the Eiffel tour but was taller, this proved to be very helpful with navigating out way back to the hotel late at night/early in the morning :)

I was pumped with our hotel as I expected it to be miniscule and really expensive but it was probably about 35$ a night divided between the 4 of us and really big, we spent some time taking in the view from our hotel and getting ready to go out. We went out that night in the Roponggi District we were walking around trying to find a restaurant and finally felt so hungry we were just like – lets eat here, where a woman was standing with this guy who was holding up a big sign with pictures of weird looking food, so after a 5 minute conversation of neither of us understanding either of us, they started to lead us down the street! Like we were a parade! Because the guy was waving the sign a lot, and the woman was behind and we just kept walking and walking and we were like we want to go to a nice place this is going to be a little crappy hole in the wall and we cross streets and when we finally arrive it’s really really AWESOME. We have to duck to get in the door and everyone at the restaurant is welcoming us (the parade leader had a head set) and bowing and we walk up this big staircase where we have to take off our shoes and store them in a little cubby and then the floor of the restarant is a glass walkway on top of this pretty sand artish/zen gardenish bottom and we sit on the floor in our own private area kind of and our waiter was really funny and animated and trying to speak English and help us with the menu and we ordered a bunch of traditional food and tried it all and it was really fancy and weird, I still couldn’t even tell you what we ate but it was good and then miraculously inexpensive! It was almost the best experience of the whole trip and a great way to start it off.

Another best thing about Japan is that you don’t have to tip! Haha in restaurants and in cabs- also almost everyone speaks some English and most are very friendly and helpful so we were not completely lost. I also was pleasantly surprised as we were told that Japan was very expensive, and while it was, we were able to find some good deals and stuff.

That night was a very crazy mix of culture, the first place we went to was a salsa bar in Japan that was filled with men from Africa and people were drinking white russians! Haha it was very nuts but we of course salsa’d I with our dorkey travel partner Tim from CO but Jackie with some Japanese men and Christina with some of the men from Nigeria. HAHA, I just that that’s such a crazy mix. After that we went to a crazy mix of clubs and bars and ran into many SASers, even 2 of our friends! Danielle and Casidy, which was really really exciting, while with them we met some boys from Scotland studying abroad in Japan for a few months- we danced and had a really good time with them, we went to a McDonalds and ordered a Teriyaki burger, J and T went back to our hotel while C, D, C and myself went to a few more clubs with the Scottish studiers – who took us to this really cool Karaoke place!

Karaoke is huge in Japan, we learned all about it in our global studies class the week before, you get a group – we were 10 and you go into like a pod or room by yourself, we were in this big rock room, it was crazy and we danced on the benches and sang to some old old songs and it very awesome. Then we spent the rest of the night in a club called Gas Panic (which I thought an odd title) and when it closed and we emerged it WAS LIGHT OUT! Which I thought was absolutely insane. Christinia and I decided to walk back to our hotel by following Tokyo Tower. We got back – slept for 2 hours and then started our day!

---------------------------------------- wow that’s day 1…. And it wasn’t even a full day as we didn’t get off the ship until 12… no one will read all this but I guess that’s a good thing as I tend to ramble a lot! Haha but really it was the best first Japan experience we could have ever had. ------------------------------------------------------

We got up and went to have breakfast, we ate in a place that I do not think has known Americans, it was really cool kind of coffee shop style but they brought it out – like bourgeois big but the portions! Ahhh everywhere we went the portions were SO much SMALLER. Haha. At places like this we were the fat Americans and sometimes split an extra meal. But it was pretty much just a toast shop! We got a big slice of cheese and ham toast with a little side salad. Haha it was really excellent.

A lot of our days were taken up with navigating the trains and trying to find our way to stations, so I think I’ll try to leave that out from now on, but after breakfast we spent a good amount of time trying to find our way to the Sumo tournament that was going on, we walked forever and ever, eventually finding the place where Sumo wrestlers do their practicing, which was cool because we saw a wrestler on a little bike as well as some just walking around. But a man yelled at us across the street asking us if we were lost, then he gave us directions written in Japanese to show a cab drive how to get to the actual stadium, which was excellent and so so so nice.

So! We got there and watched Sumo for about a half hour, it was really cool, I recorded a video of it on my camera! We went into the Sumo meuseum and yeah, it was cool because they are in the middle of a big tournament so later actually we saw some of it on T.V. it wasn’t very crowded that early in the day but later at night it would have been packed. Sumo was what I expected I guess but a lot more elegant and artistic, there was a lot of bowing and singing in between and the referee outfit was really beautiful and it was very ritualistic, if that’s even a word, they would warm up the same way, but not all warmed up so some must have already had matches? It was way faster than I expected, one go each for every pair, if they accidentally fell right away, like just slipped and fell over that was it, they bowed and left, the winner always did a bow on the stage, while both bowed while leaving (we bowed a lot in Japan! A lot a lot, a sign of respect and humility and all that, I really liked bowing) but yeah there were some really hard core fans, though it was fairly silent in the room, though I doubt that’s the case and night, but I noticed the fellow SASers where the only ones taking pictures, so maybe that’s not so cool.

Every where we went we were pretty much the only white people, except out at night and when we saw SASers, it was different, we also experienced discrimination! Which was very interesting and probably good for me, we weren’t allowed in a few places because we weren’t Japanese. I guess they didn’t want annoying Americans pointing, taking pictures and being confused by things, also some cabs wouldnt pick us up but again I suppose this is a good thing as we wouldn’t have been able to understand each other and we’d of end up in very much the wrong place – which happened to us on day 3, though in Tokyo we honestly had nothing but practically ease getting around.

Anyway we left Sumo to check out the Imperial Palace, we walked around the outside of it (as you can only enter on 2 days out of the year) it was really cool, what we could see of it was beautiful, surrounded by water, very straight looking guards standing in front of the entrances, really cool doctor Sousse looking trees, it was just really cool looking area, I’ll have to post a picture for better explanation.

Next we made our way to Kabukki theater – which is traditional Japanese all male theater that is like musical, we just made it – had to run up like… probably 100,000 flights of stairs, haha a lot of very steep stairs and had to sit far away from each other, but personally I thought it was really cool, the costumes were really gorgeous and their face paint and like there was a lot of singing and musical interments and it was funny, people were laughing, of course I had no idea what was going on and after when someone told me the story line mine was so opposite of the truth that it was really funny. But it was cool.

By the end of this we were practically delirious as we hadn’t eaten all day -it was like 7 and so we plopped our selves down at a fairly American/Italian place and were accidentally annoying Americans as we couldn’t stop laughing that the woman next to us was delivered 7 Doritos as an appetizer, not 2 bucket sized baskets of chips, but 7 Doritos on a plate. Hahaha, it was a lot of that, also they brought us out entirely not what we ordered but it was good and pizza and we were happy.

We shopped around a bit but didn’t buy anything, then headed back to the hotel so we could make our reservation at the ICE BAR, there are like… 7 of them, they’re absolute vodka ice bars, bars made entirely of ice, the glasses, the chairs the tables, walls, everything. And when we got there, you only can stay for like 45 min, it was really really cool, we had made reservations with some other friends so we all met up took a bunch of pictures, talked to some other people in the bar and we had to wear these big silver and white fur coats and it was really cute and fun.

This second night in Tokyo wasn’t as eventful as the first we went to a few places saw a lot of SASers then called it a night but got ridiculously lost trying to get home, got in a cab and was taken to the wrong hotel, got ridiculously lost INSIDE the hotel, for an HOUR, because all the lights were off and there were all these little escalators and turns and locked doors, and it was crazy and really scary. Haha we eventually made it home, which is good because we had to wake up early the next day for

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We woke up early to travel to Kyoto! We first ate (a very expensive) hotel breakfast with a lot of crazy food in small portions, we had little difficulty getting on the right train but unfortunately couldn’t see Mt. Fuji from it! Kyoto was amazing but we had a lot of bad luck there! Right out of the train station we got miserably lost for the next 2 hours, we went to a temple, the Himiji (I think that’s what it was I’ll double check later) temple was near there so we took a cab to see it, when we were inside it started to absolutely down pour, so our shoes outside were soaked and as we walked we got soaked and so ran into a chain Japanese restaurant and it was absolutely crazy, though the first time we actually got a good amount of water, everywhere else you got like a shot glass size of water, ridiculous. haha.

But we couldn’t adequately communicate with anyone even though we had maps and pointed to were we wanted to go, and people kept giving us maps, and it was good because we got to walk around a lot but it was just very hard, the streets there were very small, so what we would think to be an ally side street would actually be a major road, so that was an interesting experience, we had a lot of difficulty finding a place to stay, we wanted to stay in a Ryokan (spelled completely wrong) a traditional Japanese hotel, but couldn’t find one, eventually found a business hotel though, so that was good, and we could rent bikes! But they were out, so we walked around our area a little more and – this was really cool – came upon a really wide river in the middle of the city and streets where a lot of people were kind of just relaxing and in one spot it had large stones going across it in a pattern that we saw a few people walk across and we sat there for awhile, it was really relaxing and I thought about in Bikram yoga they say that peace isn’t absolute calm, it’s being calm in the midst of chaos and that’s kind of what this was. We walked across the river and I really loved that because it’s nothing we could have found in a guide book but we were the only Americans there and it was really fabulous.

We tried to find a restaurant – couldn’t. We spend 2 hours trying to find “Gion Corner” where at 8:30 they had this rundown of Japanese art for tourists that was like a truncated tea ceremony, some flower arranging, some singing, it sounded absolutely perfect. We walked around like a 6 block area for 2 hours and finally found it at like 8:25 to realize it had started at 8, BUT I learned a lesson, as Americans we do not listen, because the first guy who gave us directions gave us absolutely perfect directions, but I guess we didn’t listen and had to ask like 8 more people, we are incredible bad listeners. And also stupid.

But it was not a total bust because we had finally found our way to Gion (haha at like 8pm at night-it took us all day)! Which is the district in Kyoto where there are a lot of really old cool awesome things. It was too bad we couldn’t see it by day but walking in we were all like wow – “this looks so authentic!” like we were in an amusement theme park or something, honestly it still doesn’t really hit me that it was all REAL, haha, it was just really like magical with all these paper lanterns and cool buildings and at night kind of spiritual and then there were streets and streets of little buildings and we SAW TWO GESHIA! Which was absolutely amazing. It’s like seeing Parish Hilton and Nicole Richie walking down the street. They were beautiful and walked quite quickly down the street and wouldn’t stop and talk or look at anyone, it was awesome, we got 1 picture, and then accidentally deleted it! Haha, but it’s inside our hearts I guess.

We were a little cultured out at this point so we got Italian for dinner again and then went back to the room, planned our next day out so that this confusion wouldn’t happen again, and went to bed around 12.

--------------------- Day 4! Was a pretty very good day ----------

We got up very early so we could get some positive experience in Kyoto before having to leave for Hiroshima, we went to the Golden Pavillion, which is beautiful and all gold and we got there just as it opened so we were able to not be crowd mobbed as it is so said “one of the most photographed things in Japan” though that’s highly relative but it was really awesome, we went through the whole place fast though and took a cab to the station- which was also very positive, our cab driver had made some flash cards that he showed us as we drove by things, so it was kind of like a tour… I’m not sure how much extra he drove around but it was appreciated, we saw some temples/shrines/castles/learned about the mountain, it was great, and he wrote some simple English like school – when we drove past one, so we were having a good time with him, and then his last card said “cancer of the larynx” and then he showed us the hole in his neck! And he did their no sign which is x’ing their forearms and then mock smoked so we were kind of laughing but kind of horrified and it was insane but… we were glad to have met him and gotten the tour.
But we were wondering how the Japanese average life is so much longer then ours, as tons of them smoke. But not this guy anymore.

My guide book (Japan by Rail – VERY helpful the whole time, wrong time for Gion Corner thing though) made it clear that all trains go to Hiroshima, so of course we got on the wrong one, but not because it didn’t go there, but because it was an express super bullet train and the one train we were not allowed on with our rail pass! Ahh so we spent the whole time ducking from the conductors and standing near the bathrooms and doors pretending we were going to exit at the next stop and I for one was incredibly stressed out but we made it in one piece, fairly easily navigated our way through the bus system and got to Hiroshima Peace Memorial.

I don’t really know how to describe it there. A lot of kids had to write papers and stuff and I suppose if I did I would write about the difference between the Peal Harbor memorial – the end of that presentation is like we tracked down the Japanese ships that the planes were on and destroyed them… we got them back/justification attitude. Hiroshima was like… and everything was destroyed, we didn’t think there would be vegetation ever again, those who weren’t wiped off the earth developed cancer 10 years later and died, “A-bomb disease” they called it, the younger the quicker the onset. I would write about how unbiased it was, they didn’t blame us really… it was very: this is what happens in nuclear war, this is how many war heads there are (and we learned in class that tactical war heads – such as those used in Hiroshima are now not even in the count, they can be made as small as backpack sized. What they keep track of are bombs that the one tested made the island it was tested on completely disappear.), this is who has them and who tests them and as you can see this is why they should never be tested again. They had a big model of what the city looked like and then a big model of what it looked like after and it would have been very hard not to cry in there. I don’t think that a single person could walk away from the museum and not feel 1. sick and 2. that there should be a single nuclear weapon on this planet. I was obviously in the mindset that it had been horrible, but you don’t know until you really think about it and… in a sense see it, cause we could see it in the pictures, stories, and models and stuff, and just thinking about it now- I know that nuclear weapons are absolutely ridiculous, if I do in my lifetime get to run for office it will be on the platform or with the agenda of getting rid of ours, because the fact that we still have them, have seriously thought of using them I think it was 12 times since 1946, including last year, and tested one last year, is something to worry about.

The museum was pretty heavy, the upstairs being even more personal stories, and they had the watch that like stopped when it happened, and the shadow of the person on the steps (which they had removed from where they were and put into the museum), and the story of the little girl who thought if she folded 1,000 paper cranes she would live and did but died, and ahh just everything overwhelming, so we took a break and walked around the city for awhile, which was a pretty cool city, we actually found a subway sandwiches, and ate there, it was crazy from a comparative advertisement perspective, their sandwiches were tiny and they put on 2 pickles and 3 olives and that was the picture, of these little single sliced meat sandwiches. Also there were hotdog sandwiches and fish sandwiches with raw fish and shrimp and blach, but also they had fry’s there and I tried a wrap.

But after that we walked over the T shaped bridge that was the target for the bomb and around the gardens – life did grow there again, and saw the only building that’s still standing, it was a pretty impressive looking building, it had had a copper roof that melted instantly, everyone inside it had died, but it’s structure and dome frame are still intact and it was pretty intense. There are several memorials there – the children’s peace memorial made up of cranes and billions of paper cranes, a flame that will burn until there are no more nuclear weapons, a tomb filled with all the names of the people that died, some shrines and stuff.

Hiroshima was very much out of the way but it was incredibly moving and I am very glad that I got there. – Also we ran into some SASers on a day trip there, and they all looked really clean had had their hair done and stuff and we were so sweaty (the whole time it was so so HOT in Japan) and they were just so stupid, we told them they looked clean and they said “yeah but you guys probably got like more cultured” and we were like… ‘yeah.’ and that was that. we were sweaty dirty messes but we experienced a lot.

That evening we backtracked to Kobe – where our ship was, and luckly saw two SAS boys getting on the train in Hiroshima because they knew exactly these 3 transfers we had to do and we did not, it was really great to be back on the boat for our last night and drop off our backpacks and sleep in our own beds! We showered, ate dinner on the ship, then got dressed and went out in Kobe, there a lot of SASers out including 3 of the captains – which was pretty creepy honestly but we had a pretty good time until tension that builds when you spend 4 strait days with someone you’re not perfectly compatible with kind of irrupted for me… but we went out with some other friends so I was able to vent. We also tried karaoke again, but it definitely went A LOT less smoothly because there were more of us, and it was all in Japanese, which you know, none of us knew. Haha, but then we walked home (back to the ship) and it was a really nice good walk, I walked with a boy I have a crush on for awhile. And also I vented a bit more… haha. but yeah. very good night

--------- Last Day! If you haven’t given up reading yet!! !!! !!! I actually wrote this down first… but. Yeah. --- -------- ---

The last day, so now not yesterday but the day before was awesome, we got up, had breakfast on the boat at 8, and left around 9, we (being me, Jackie, Jess, Christina and Camillo – a pretty nice but really attractive guy) walked to the maritime museum, which was this big cool architectured building that we could see from the ship, but didn’t really know how to get to, we arrived just when it opened and I hadn’t been incredibly excited about it but when we got in, which was right away, IT WAS SO AWESOME, it had all these boats that were really cool looking in it and outside of it and really detailed miniature models of boats and there was this section on boats of the future, and there was a design for this event boat that was like a sports stadium on a boat with like a water park, and it made me feel better because I was like hey, if the ice melts and we live on the sea that won’t be so bad because there will still be sports to see and watch.

And then, the other half of the museum, completely unsuspected to me, as this was the maritime museum, was the motorcycle room! And the train and jet ski room! And the airplane and dump truck room! And all these crazy interactive games and models and this big room that was like walls of TV and yeah… really it was just very cool.

So then we went and did some shopping! As we had refrained from doing so the rest of the week – here we split up as our shopping was at a different pace, and became 3 (me jess and jackie) a much better shopping number – we tried green tea ice cream (VERY gross) this became probably the only ice cream of my life I did not finish. Feeling energized we decided to try and walk to find this recommended restaurant for Kobe Beef (which was pretty much our only goal for the day apart from shopping and getting some culture) and we stumbled into this forever long street of all Japanese shops, I saw a samurai sword shop but didn’t know how I could have gotten that home to my dear brother as the ship doesn’t allow weapons.

We did stop in a hand painted plate/cup/pottery shop and it was so so so awesome, they were so nice to us and brought us out tea and were trying to speak English and I bought some stuff and they wrapped it up really nice and it was a fun time. Then we were really hungry so we got into a cap but the language barrier was such that he just kicked us right out again… which sucked… haha stuff like that happened to us kind of a lot and it was horrible and it just reiterated to me all the time what a stupid American I was and if a Japanese man got in my cab and was like take me to this place I would be like what?! Get out of my cab because we do not understand each other.

But then we found were we wanted to go on a map and pointed at it to our next cab, but that also was confusing, as we got dropped off down the street, but when we finally found the restaurant, it was. the best. lunch. ever, that I have ever had! Ahh it was so good we almost didn’t get in because you needed a reservation but somehow we did and it was like itchibans in MN where they cook your food for you on your table and you sit with some other people (which was good because we saw how to do it – ahhhh only CHOPSTICKS ! that was all through Japan though. except with the soup) but it was amazing. according to my friend that never stops talking- most beef we eat in America is like a 3 on the beef scale and Kobe Beef is a 7, it comes from… cows in a really horrific way I won’t recount as half my friends are vegetarians these days. But for those who aren’t, you haven’t lived until you go to Kobe and eat some Kobe beef, haha seriously and it was a really elegant place, and we got a little salad, and he cooked these vegetables and bean sprouts and tofu and this Japanese potato and there were these little sauces, and it was just… really cool culturally and tastily, I’ll post a picture from there later.

Ooookkkkayyy, so then we had to get some money because we were completely out and had no idea how to get back to our ship and had to get on the subway and so we had to take out a bunch of money (the minium is a 10,000 bill – haha it’s like 88$ though, but it looks really cool) so then of course we had to spend it and the rest of our day we did a little more shopping and then had to be back on the boat by 8. which is were I am now! Last night everyone talked all about their Japan adventures and I made some more friends and it was really great. Though one kid got left behind because he lost his passport, oh my god! I must not lose my passport in China.

Japan was amazing, especially in Tokyo when everything fell into place and it was very easy for us to get around, I was like Japan is amazing, I want to live here, but to be honest, after thinking more about it I believe I wish I could travel for like… 3 weeks there, I was very disappointed not to have been able to see mount Fuji, though I never thought I’d for sure be able to make it to Japan in my life I am now quite sure I have to make it back because I didn’t get to see Mount Fuji. : ) The problem must be that I didn’t have enough time there. I really loved the entire country, I experienced a lot, learned a ton, had a lot of fun, I did honestly really really love the entire trip through Japan.

China tomorrow!! My flight to Beijing is early afternoon! I’ll report back asap! : )