Japan

Japan… check. After completing the last main port of call (aside from one day in Hawaii and two days in Costa Rica), and conquering the rail system, I am officially an experienced traveler. I strongly believe that if you can learn and successfully use the Japan Rail, you can do anything. The system wouldn’t be nearly as difficult if it weren’t in all Japanese; but we got really good at matching Japanese characters. Oh, and it’s worth mentioning that as I am writing this I am living my second day of April 15, 2008. No, it’s not Groundhog Day… we crossed the International Dateline early this morning and lucky us, we get to fit two days of class into one normal day! So basically, what I have concluded is that I am really a day older than it says on the calendar. I have lived an extra 24 hours… maybe I should celebrate my next birthday on January 20!?!?

Anyways, back to Japan. We arrived on the 11th in Kobe (land of amazing beef) and the disembarkation process was the toughest we’ve seen, yet. I guess since we came from China we were suspect for carrying the Avian flu, so before anyone could even get their passports looked at we all had to walk past this infrared gun that would tell the officials if we had a fever. If you had a fever, no Japan for you! This time they decided to do passport checks starting at the end of the alphabet, which was actually kind of nice because I wasn’t the one waiting on my friends all day. Japan is famous for its outstanding rail system and its outrageous price. Most SAS students bought their JR(Japan Rail) passes in Vietnam or China because it was cheaper. You apparently get your money’s worth if you travel to more than one other city outside of where you are staying. After a pretty hectic China experience, Jess, Tessa and I decided to keep it small and just travel with each other. It is so much easier that way; you can make decisions at the drop of the hat and don’t have to worry about trying to please five other people who have conflicting interests. It is definitely the way to travel.

Before you could start using your JR pass you had to get it validated, which every student was doing on the first day. Needless to say, we didn’t get on a train to Tokyo until about 5, after a few hours of standing in lines. I don’t think the train station was prepared for 700 students to bombard them with getting passes validated because they only had a few people behind the counter. For the long train rides, they (our trusty Lonely Planet book on Japan, I mean) recommend getting reserved seats in the reserved cars because it would be a bummer to have to stand for three hours to Tokyo, hence why we couldn’t leave earlier. First impression of Japan: the women. They dress like they are going out on the town in their best outfits at 10 a.m., and don’t for a second think that they wear shoe besides heals. Their hair, their makeup, their outfits and accessories- all flawless! Kind of makes you feel bad for wearing your comfortable tennis shoes and jeans and sweatshirts. And it gets worse- places you think that it is just impossible to wear heals to (i.e. baseball games, Disney Land, sight seeing), they do. It’s crazy the importance they give to glamour.

Since we had a few hours to kill in the Kobe train station, we walked into a tourist office to see if they could book us a hotel in Tokyo for that night. We made our way to our bullet train and in three hours we were in Tokyo. My Women’s studies teacher had discussed with us the prevalence of Manga (Japanese “comics,” often not really comic as much as adult reading, if you will) among businessmen traveling on trains. Lucky for me, the businessman seated next to me was reading it. We arrived in Tokyo around 8 and hopped in a taxi to our hotel. It was one that was highly recommended by our book for the great nightlife around it. All I wanted was sushi but because the menus were in Japanese and the pictures consisted of only raw-looking foods, we didn’t really want to risk it. So we were brave and ventured a block away to none other than Outback Steakhouse. And you know I got the ribs! Red meat is non-existent on the ship and being at Outback was like a dream come true. However, there was one small problem I had with the meal… I ordered a glass of red wine at the bar while waiting for our table and Jess started cracking up when she saw them pouring it out of the Franzia box. Tessa and Jess thought it was funny, I, however, did not considering I just spent $5 on a glass of Franzia wine when you can buy the whole box with that. Japanese Outbacks are making a killing off of selling boxed wine! They should at least hide it better, or maybe people in Japan don’t know how cheap it is. After dinner we took a cab to the famous Tokyo Absolut Ice Bar. We didn’t actually make it inside because as we were walking up a whole bunch of SAS students were walking out. Apparently you had to pay $35 to even get in and even though they gave you a parka to wear, you were freezing within 5 minutes of being in there. But, as the name says, the entire bar was made out of ice, even the glasses. We weren’t about to waste $35 to go freeze our buns off, so we left. You know, it really amazes me how no matter what country we are in, and where we are in that country, all the SAS students still manage to terrorize the same street. Our hotel was blocks from all of the fun and the party didn’t stop for many of my friends until 7 a.m. (not me, of course, because I’m an Awtry and staying up past midnight is quite a feat.) A lot of people stayed out until the fish market opened at 4 or 5 a.m.; apparently that was a sight, but not something Jess, Tessa and I were very interested in doing. Oh, and I didn’t mention that Japan, especially Tokyo, was really cold! Well, not really cold, but at night it got down to 40 or so, and no one really has warm clothes with them because everywhere else has been in the 80s.

The next morning, our first priority was to find baseball tickets to the Tokyo Giants game that night. Our hotel dude was not great at English and could not verbalize very well how we should go about getting these tickets. He kept telling us to go to this convenient store, and the words coming out of his mouth sounded nothing like the name of the store. After getting no where, I asked him to write the name of the store down, and miraculously, the name was Lawson’s. I swear, we would have never guessed that was even close to what he was saying. This happened a lot, though. The Japanese who can speak a little English can write it phenomenally. They spell everything right, they just don’t make the right sounds, so from that point on we just asked them to write everything down. We weren’t planning on staying at that hotel that night because we were hoping to find a hostel or maybe even a capsule hotel, but soon found that most capsule hotels are for businessmen and none of the hostels were in a very good location. Since we didn’t know where we were staying we carried our backpacks with us all day, and I think after this trip and the many before it, I have permanent back damage from carrying four days worth of living on my shoulders. Aside from wanting baseball tickets we wanted to go to the Tokyo Tower, famous for its replication of the Eiffel Tower. Well, I’ll get to that later, but it didn’t come close to comparing to the Eiffel Tower. The same hotel guy told us it would be a 20 minute walk to the Tower, and he also had no idea where a nearby Lawson’s was, so he was no help. We decided to walk in the general direction of the Tower since we were able to see it. It didn’t look far, but nothing that big ever looks that far away. We stopped in every convenient store along the way, even though they weren’t a Lawson’s, hoping that they would sell baseball tickets. If they did, we’d never know it, because the language barrier was so bad. After playing charades and acting out baseball, people finally got what we meant and shook their heads at us that they didn’t sell tickets. One man was walking past us, who looked American, and was nice enough to ask us if we needed help and miraculously, a Lawsons’s was about a block away. Well, these tickets they sell come out of a machine, and the machine only knows Japanese, and the worker only knows Japanese, so that made for another interesting adventure. After he got that we wanted baseball tickets for that night, he helped us through the process of getting the tickets. He did understand the word “cheap” and luckily didn’t buy us the expensive seats. Feeling really impressed with ourselves that we accomplished priority number one, we continued to the Tokyo Tower. We bought the tickets to go to the mid point observance area and didn’t feel it was necessary to pay more money to go higher, so after walking around for a bit, we made our way back to our hotel. Pretty exhausted from walking for hours with our backpacks, we decided that we should just stay at the same hotel as the night before. Problem was we didn’t have a reservation. This is where we got creative, or you might say, frugal. Japan, as do many Asian countries, charge more for a second or third person, even if the room is made for two or three people. We knew that we’d get a cheaper rate if only two of us went inside and bought the room, so Jess and I went to the counter and explained our change of plans and that we needed a room for just us two. Well the lady said they only had two single rooms left at yada yada price. We asked if we could just squeeze both of us into one room, and miraculously the price jumped 20 bucks. Annoyed that they pull that, we agreed to pay the more expensive price and snuck Tessa in. Well the room that we had the night before was a room with two double beds, but this was a “single” room, with one double bed for the three of us. It was interesting, but we made it work. Hey, it saved us money and we were still in our great location.

We got ready for the big game and headed off to the train station to try to figure out how to get to the Tokyo Dome. After switching from the subway to the JR to get to the dome, we made it about an hour later. We were thrilled at the first sight of hot dogs and burgers and churros!!!!! We found our seats, ironically only two rows down from Brittany and Dylan who bought theirs somewhere else, and a ton of other SAS kids. Apparently we all had the same idea and bought the cheap seats. The dome was somewhat upsetting; not quite the same atmosphere as being at a ballpark, but still exciting. Now you know those annoying people who walk around yelling “Hotdogs, Peanuts!”? Well, instead of those people, they have these tiny girls with kegs strapped to their backs who talk in the sweetest little voices selling beer. And these girls can sprint up and down the narrow stairs like it’s no big deal. I can’t imagine how heavy the kegs are, but there are at least three on each aisle at any given time. It was also interesting because they sold many different types of beer, it wasn’t like the game or the dome was sponsored by a particular company. Oh, and for all our friends at home who think Sapporo is the king of beers in Japan… nope. They didn’t sell it hardly anywhere we went, not even restaurants or bars. This really made Jess sad because she was really looking forward to getting her “first” (haha) taste of Sapporo. We enjoyed another fun night out in Tokyo, but the highlight was having our first taste of true Japanese Karaoke. Instead of it being in a bar setting, they rent out these rooms fit for about 10-15 people and you pay by the hour. It was a lot of fun.

The next morning we got up and headed to the place we were most excited about… TOKYO DISNEY!!! It was like being 10 years old again, we were so excited. The three of us ran around like little kids for hours riding all of our favorite rides. I think part of what made it so exciting was that it felt like being in America, with familiar songs of our childhood and our favorite Disney characters. And no, they don’t have Japanese people dressed up like Snow White or Cinderella… they were all white characters. Space Mountain was by far our favorite, but we of course enjoyed It’s a Small World and Haunted Mansion, too. What was really weird is that there wasn’t a single Disney t-shirt to be found… I guess it’s because the Japanese women don’t wear t-shirts so there isn’t a market for them, but we were bummed because we all wanted one. After Disney, we headed to the Tokyo train station to reserve tickets for our train that night to Kyoto. We couldn’t leave until 7 and all of the tourist companies were closed so we just prayed that the budget hotel we had picked out was going to have vacancy. We couldn’t call because none of our phones worked with the Japanese system, so we just hoped that it would all work out. Well, we arrived around 10:30 and walked in the pouring rain from Kyoto station to our hotel, which was very difficult to find. After finally finding it thirty minutes later, there was a nice little sign on the front desk that said there was no vacancy. I’m not sure why we thought there would be… it’s cherry blossom season and we were trying to go to Lonely Planet’s number one pick for cheap hotels in Kyoto. We walked around for about another thirty minutes, about to cry because it was cold, raining, and we had no idea where we were going to sleep. We met some Americans walking and they told us we could sleep at an Internet care for $10, and this just made us even more upset. We agreed that if the next place we went into didn’t have vacancy then we would just get back on the next train to Kobe and sleep on the ship since it was only a 45 minute train ride away and just go to Kyoto the next morning. Well, lucky for us, the next place we tried worked out and it even had three beds in one room. The next day I got my Starbucks Chai latte fix—some countries have had Starbucks, but very few sell Chai lattes, instead they have Green Tea lattes, which I tried but are not so great. We took the city bus to the Golden Pavilion, which was absolutely beautiful. The gardens in Kyoto are amazing, especially during cherry blossom season. The bus back to the station was horribly crowded and miserable, so we were really glad we didn’t have to use it more than once. We hopped on a train back to Kobe since the ship was leaving that night, dropped our bags off, and headed out for a Kobe beef dinner. The beef was AMAZING! I’ve never had anything like it. We had to hurry back to the ship to make it back before 9; if you make it back later you get dock time and have to spend extra time on the ship in the next port. We weren’t about to get dock time in Hawaii, since we only have the day there. We arrive in about 6 days and between now and then I have an overwhelming amount of school work to do since we haven’t had but about 6 classes in the last month or so. I will have an exciting adventure to write about after Hawaii. Until next time! Xoxo Marissa.