Japan-night #1, Tokyo

Japan!

…Where do I begin? I feel like I experienced so much it’s unbelievable. First of all, in general, Japanese people are sooo friendly and nice. They are also very quiet. Everywhere we went it just felt like no one was talking. In the US cities always seem so loud and obnoxious; Japanese cities are way different, there was no honking and no people talking really loud all over the place. Oh my gosh and holy crap Japanese people are sooooooooo clean. I felt like I was in a video game when we first got off, the streets have no gum on them, it looks perfect. It is SO weird being in these cities and everything is soooo clean, it felt so fake. And it makes no sense because it seems like its SO hard to find garbage cans if you ever want to throw something away, where do they put all their garbage? Japan is so awesome though, it really exceeded my expectations.

Anyways, we pulled into the port of Yokohama around 9 30am. We were the first sea off the ship (they group wings of the ship by a “sea”; for example we were in the Mediterranean sea) so it took a little bit to wait for our friends to get off. Lindsay (roomie) got a few drinks at this little café around the port. We finally got our friends, I was traveling with 4 other girls-Lindsay, Emily, Anne, and Laurel (They’re all so cool)-we weren’t in Yokohama for very long. Yokohama was pretty built up but it didn’t seem like anything too special. So we took the subway from a small station in Yokohama to the main Yokohama station. From there we transferred to a line that took us to Tokyo. It wasn’t that far, it probably took us about 20 minutes or so to get to Tokyo (plus the time it took to figure out where the heck we were going). We got off in Tokyo to what we though was the heart of Tokyo, only to find that we were in the business district and it was nothing we wanted to see. By this time we were all tired and hungry so we decided to eat lunch (or so, it was around 3pm). We ate at this little place that was sort of connected to the train station. It was good though, we got beers and had our first authentic Japanese meal. Oh we also discovered that Japan still allows smoking indoors. It was weird because they are such health freaks and so cleanly—you can’t even smoke outside in most places unless it’s a designated smoking area. Oh, also Japanese people are so weird—I’m not kidding literally everywhere you go people are wearing those like masks that cover your face that like doctors and stuff wear. They’re such germ freaks, I bet at least one of every twenty people had one on. It looks so ridiculous, but you kind of get used to it after a while. After we finished our meal we took the subway to Akbonoboshi (not sure if I spelled that right), it’s the station our capsule hotel was in, right near downtown Tokyo. Our capsule hotel was so great, we stayed at a place called The Ace Inn—the capsule was great. There were a bunch of floors (some men floors, some women) and there were like bunk bed type things all over the room. They were actually really big. The floor had a community bathroom in the room and a big area where the lockers were to put our stuff in. The capsules themselves didn’t lock, there is just a curtain over your bed. The capsule was so fun. The showers were downstairs in the basement and it cost 100 yen for 10 minutes. 100 yen is about equal to .85 US dollars. After we got into our hotel and situated we got ready and went to the main downtown Tokyo for dinner. We ate at this very authentic, very nice restaurant we came across. Every table was line enclosed in a little area. I got some kind of meal with shrimp, I can’t remember exactly what, I remember it was really good. This was probably the most expensive meal we ate, but it wasn’t too bad, I spent probably a little over $20, maybe 30. After dinner we walked around Tokyo and we went to this bar called Muse, which a bunch of SAS kids were going to apparently. We got there a little early and it wasn’t that crowded yet so we decided to go walk around more for a little while. We ended up going to this place that looked like it had drinks (it was one like the 4th floor of a building), but we accidently walked into the wrong building and my friend Emily said her father was here so she let us up in this elevator and it turned out to be a totally different place than what we wanted. It seemed really exclusive and we were like boxed in in this area and we got a bottle of wine and some more food (dinner #2?) After we left we went back to Muse and there were tons of SAS kids. We stayed there the whole night, really late, we probably got home around 5 am. There were TONS of people out in Tokyo on the streets still, there were a lot of really creepy African men. We took a cab back to our capsule hotel, which Lindsay and I both paid for because everyone else ran out of yen…I only spend like 8 dollars though, it wasn’t too bad. We got back to our capsule safe and sound and we woke up around 10 or so the next morning to travel around Tokyo. I signed up to workout at 1:30 so I have to go get ready, I’ll post more later about the rest of Japan. Were also going to be in China not tomorrow, but the next day! I can’t belive we only have two days in between Japan and China, I’m exhausted. Ps-we only have 4 days left of classes total in February-including today, so weird/awesome!