Japan

Konnichiwa! Yeah, another update – finally! Just so you know, all those days you checked this site and were wondering where the updates were, I was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, wondering where Japan was. We went, and now I am back on the boat!

I had five days in Japan. I saw: Yokohama, Tokyo, Kyoto, Nara, Hiroshima, and Kobe. In five days. How did I do that? This is my (grossly long) story. To help you out though the paragraphs are broken up like so:

Wednesday in Yokohama and Tokyo.
Thursday in Tokyo.
Friday in Kyoto and Nara and Kobe.
Saturday in Kobe and Hiroshima.
Sunday in Kobe.
School Stuff.

We arrived in Yokohama at 7:30 AM. I got four hours of sleep that night, and woke up early to watch us dock. Japanese people were at the pier, playing music for us, taking pictures, and waving, it was very cute. Disclaimer: EVERYBODY and EVERYTHING in Japan was either cute beyond words, uncannily nice, or extremely delicious. We did not get off the boat until 12:30…everybody was going crazy just looking at land and thinking about their trips. Finally we get off and I was signed up for a trip called “Let’s do it over Lunch” where we were going to go somewhere (I still don’t know exactly where) south of Yokohama, meet up with a really important guy from Sony Corporation, and have lunch and a lecture with him. The scenario was that we had just been hired by a Japanese company and we had to research before hand cultural do’s and don’ts of interacting and eating in a business setting. So we were all dressed up, and it took us about 3 hours to get to this place. But we had left the boat so late that we didn’t actually get the lunch!!!! I was furious. I’m pretty sure we get our money back though. We listen to this hour long lecture, which was interesting…and then start the 3 hour trek back. It felt like a waste of a day, so far. My plan was to go back to the boat, find people to walk around Yokohama with, maybe meet up with my friend Cody that was visiting in Japan, and get up for my Cultural Tokyo trip that left the next morning at 8. That’s when Katie peer pressured me into going to Tokyo with her to meet up with our other friends and not wasting a second of time in Japan. It was getting late and I hadn’t found a phone yet so I had no way of calling Cody until about 8 PM, when she told me that she was just leaving Yokohama…so that was too bad  Anyhow, the tone had been set for the rest of my travels. I hopped on a bus, and it took about 3 hours to get to Tokyo. Then we had to find our hostel and we were supposed to check in by 9 and meet up with the rest of our group at 6. So by 8:45 when we got off the public transportation, we literally sprinted through Tokyo trying to find out hostel. At one point a lady trying to help us biked around and we ran after her in the direction of our hostel! People are so willing to just completely drop what they are doing to help you! It’s amazing! We get to our hostels and the rest of our group was actually there, and they’d just gotten there 10 minutes ago!! So that was extremely lucky that we’d all gotten there around the same time and safely. We set out for the night, ran into a couple of other SAS kids, and went out to dinner. Then we just walked around and looked at stuff. At about 1 AM we decided to start heading back to the hostel, but we found a sushi place and stopped there instead. We had a little snack and then made it back by about 2. The hostel had free internet, so we spent HOURS on it and it was great! Around 3:30 I was done with the internet and a little bored, cuz I wasn’t planning on sleeping, when I heard these two guy speaking French. I asked them if I could speak French with them and they were like, ‘you’re the first American we’ve talked to who could speak French!’ so they were all excited and we talked pretty much just in French for about 40 minutes! It was so much fun! Then I killed time until 5 AM when it was time to go meet some other SAS kids that were heading back for 8 AM trips.

So I met up with two boys and we started trying to figure out how to get back to Yokohama. Good thing we met at 5:30 because we did not get back until 7:50 AM!! We ran on to the boat, I changed clothes super quickly, and then walked right off the boat again. After having not slept at all. My Cultural Tokyo tour was really cool though! We went to a big Shinto shrine (I have brochures but I don’t remember the names….sorry) and learned how to ceremoniously wash our hands and mouth and then bowed and went into the shrine and made a wish and then looked at the gift shop. The next stop was the gardens of the Imperial Palace – which were beautifully manicured! I saw some disgusting spiders and some big colorful fish and a lot of pretty plants. After that was the Asakusa district which is where I had actually just been the previous night. There were a lot of shrines and things that I hadn’t seen at nighttime, and there were so many shops and cute things! We weren’t at each place for all that long, so pretty soon it was time to get on the bus again and we went to the Roppongi district. We went to the 52nd floor of some building and had a sweet view of Tokyo! There was a random museum up there too. So after we had done all that, we returned to the boat at about 5:30. I showered, repacked my bag for the coming days, ate dinner, and met up with my next travel group at 8 PM. I still had not slept.

We leave at 8 from the Yokohama port BACK to Tokyo station (so much back and forth!) From Tokyo station, we had to catch some trains and things to catch our night bus. We made our bus with about 3 minutes to spare. Our bus was an overnight bus that you could sleep (uncomfortably) on. It left at 9:50 PM and arrived in Kyoto (other side of the country) at 5:30 AM. I slept poorly for about 4 hours. Upon arrival in Kyoto with my group of 11 other people (Lindsay, Charlotte, Nate, Brittney, Jason, Katie, Kat, Meredith, Ellen, Jenna, Stevie) nothing was open so we wondered around and looked at maps to get an idea of what we wanted to do that day. When a little café opened, we had some Japanese pancakes for breakfast. Then the group split, Charlotte, Nate, Brittney, Jason and Meredith went to Nara, the rest of us stayed in Kyoto for a while. We went to the largest wooden structure in the world – a big Buddhist temple that didn’t allow shoes, so we walked around the temple and museum on tatami mats in bare feet…it was so much fun! The group of girls I was with were amazing! It is really hard to find people you travel well with…but we were all running on little to no sleep, nobody was rude, pushy, aggressive, snappy, or anything else negative. Our motto was, “we’re in Japan; life is great!!” and we all wanted to see the same things and go at the same pace and we all really enjoyed the things we were learning about and it was just so chill, everybody worked together to plan and use transportation and it was just wonderful. I got so lucky finding them! After the Buddhist temple we went to a really pretty garden and walked around that for a while. Then we had our first lunch and looked at some souvenir things. After lunch we went to Nara and had our second lunch. This place was so cool, you just put your money into a vending machine, hit the buttons of the food you want, give the ticket that comes out to the restaurant people, and it’s ready to eat in about a minute…Japanese fast food is way better than American fast food!!! We took a bus that was within walking distance of the biggest Buddha in Japan. However, to walk there, we had to go through the deer…these deer are not just ‘tame’, they are abusive!! They would nuzzle our clothing and leave boogers on them, try to rip our bags out of our hands and eat our ice cream cones! It was pretty funny! We all took lots of pictures. We made our way to big Buddha and it was amazing!! We all got fortunes, but mine was all bad luck so I tied it to a rail and I guess it will get burned from there. After spending a leisurely afternoon walking around Nara we headed to Kobe to our hotel. Our hotel was actually on the outskirts of Kobe, and it was really easy to get to! Transportation took a long time, but it was within walking distance of the station we got off at. We ran into Nate just then and got to our AMAZING hotel. We had two rooms reserved for 5 people each even though there were 12 of us. They were right next door to each other, each room had a balcony facing the water/bridge/Kobe, and the floors were all tatami mats with 5 futons just sprawled out on the ground!!!! It was sooo cool!! Pretty sweet for a hotel! We put our bags down and went out for dinner to this fast food Italian place. The food was of course really good. The funniest part of the meal was these two Japanese boys, probably like 4 and 8 years old and they kept running up to our table and just staring at us, so we started saying hi and I offered to take a picture with them. After that they ran away and then came back and said, ‘where you are from?’ and we guessed that they were running back and forth between their parents and us! They were soo cute! After dinner we headed back to the hotel and hung out and chatted and used phone cards and stuff until about 2:30 AM.

Most of us got up at 6:30 AM to go back to the boat for 8 AM trips. In case you aren’t keeping track, I had now gotten only 4 hours of sleep not on public transportation since Wednesday morning, and this was Saturday now. We made it back to the boat right before 8 only to find that our trips hadn’t left yet because there were Japanese dance troops performing for our boat out on the pier!!! Their costumes were so beautiful! And after they danced for us, they made US dance with them, and they forced us to put down our bags and go out with them. Let me tell you – I looked quite stupid! After that, my trip was leaving so soon that I didn’t have time to get back on the bus and change or shower or anything. So all of a sudden I was on a 5 hour bus ride to Hiroshima. My tour guide’s name was Rumy, and I think she was the cutest person I have ever seen. She sang to us, made us sing with her, played us music, taught us about Japan, taught us words and phrases, including “okini” which means “large thanks” in Kobe/Osaka slang/vernacular. She said if we used it that we would get big smiles from people. I was getting pretty sick of Arigato so I started using Okini and everybody not just smiled at me but started laughing at me…probably because an obviously clueless tourist was using local slang…hahah. We had a couple of bathroom stops along the way, and finally we got to Hiroshima. I’m not sure what to say about it. It was creepy and eerie and intense being there. Just looking around at everything left me feeling…I guess kind of hollow. We did a fly by tour of the monuments and the A-Bomb Dome and then had just less than 2 hours to go through the museum! And I needed way more time than that…I was trying to read everything and realized that I would never be out in 2 hours so I had to speed up. The museum had so many artifacts and models of the city before and after. It had an exhibit set up of people with their skin hanging/dripping off of them, and had clothes, lunch boxes, watches stopped at exactly 8:15, stones with human shadows burned onto them, and a number of other creepy things that had been found or donated. The most nauseating one was the part of a thumb, fingernails, and skin that was all a mother could find of her child. I thought I might vomit. The atomic bomb made peoples’ fingernails grow in as black rods with blood vessels, so that when they were cut people would lose a lot of blood and then more black rods would grow…it had some of those nails too. It was disgusting. At one point when I was reading and looking at things a Japanese Peace Volunteer lady came up and started talking to me and telling me stuff that I had just read, but it was interesting to hear somebody talk me through things and explain things. She talked for a while and I nodded along and at the end she asked me where I was from. That was one of the most powerful moments for me in the museum. Somebody that had a similar experience related it to a German being in a Holocaust. I told her I was from the United States and she smiled and nodded and kept talking…but I just wanted to disappear; I almost started crying when she asked me that. Phewwww so that was a big day. After that it was another 5 hours back to Kobe with a dinner stop along the way. The bus ride was fun because I talked to this girl Tara who is from Malaysia and asked her lots of questions and she was just really cool to talk to. We got back to the boat and everybody was just WIPED out…it was like, what to we do with one more day in Japan, all we want to do is go to sleep! But I chatted with people about their experiences so far and found Victoria and Camilla and made breakfast plans for the next day. I stayed up talking to Victoria for a while and that was great. The more time I spend with her and Camilla and Katie the more I like them. Victoria and I found some cool things we have in common – the kinds of things that you only find out about in the middle of long midnight conversations, so that was great! So it was a fun night, I was happy with Japan, I had met / traveled with awesome people, and I was getting to know a smaller group better and better each day.

I woke up early to go to a Japanese bakery place for breakfast. It was so good and I brought some bread back to eat on the boat! Then Victoria, Camilla, and Lauren were going to go to Nara but Camilla’s foot was swollen … it was like the size of a small child. They weren’t sure they’d have enough time to go to Nara and come back so they all just stayed in Kobe with me. We walked around and went shopping and looked at things here and there. We stopped at a café and three of us wrote out all of our postcards. We searched for an internet café, which turned out to be magical. Jon had sent me a message that send, ‘call me as soon as you can and I can get you directions to my uncle’s restaurant’ and I wrote back like, ‘I can’t call you!! I just paid for an hour of precious internet time!! But I’ll be here for 45 more minutes so tell me the address!’ he was online and wrote back write away and sent me a link to AIM express, so I got to talk to him in real time for about 45 minutes which was fabulous! His mom called her sister and he got me the address and his aunt’s cell phone number and everything I needed to go search for his uncle’s restaurant in Kobe! Erica also sent me a message while I was online saying that she could meet me in China on Wednesday!!! So it was a good hour. Victoria and Camilla headed back to the boat and Lauren came with me to find this restaurant. A nice lady walked us to the train station and helped us buy our train tickets and told us where to go. The train stop ended up being literally $1.20 / 5 minutes / 2 train stops away!!! So we get off and I’m clutching my little picture of Jon and the map with his aunt and uncle’s name written on it. I walk into a restaurant holding the picture going, ‘Makiko?’ haha the poor lady had no idea what I was trying to do or say so she took me next door to a man who spoke a little bit of English. He was super nice and called Makiko’s cell phone, and she came and picked us up. Turned out we were just one restaurant away!! Lauren and I ordered by pointing at the beautifully arranged fake food out in the front of the restaurant, and Jon’s uncle Shige made us some very good noodles with pork. At least I hope it was pork. We could not really communicate too much, but at the end of the meal Lauren and I were trying to pray and they started waving their hands and going, ‘no no, present!’ SO CUTE. So I said, ‘okini!!!’ and they laughed at me…and another customer in the store laughed at me too that time…and I gave his aunt a hug and bowed profusely. She started talking in Japanese to Lauren and my blank faces and then searched her brain and finally said, ‘see you again,’ and … it was just such a wonderful experience!!!! I got to meet Jon’s aunt and uncle, he hasn’t even seen them in two years! So random and cool! From there Lauren and I headed back to the original train station, dropped off postcards, stocked up food and pastries, and made it back to the boat. I waited in line for a pay phone for an hour, literally, and then talked to Jon for about 15 minutes. I went to go get on the ship and I saw Lindsay and Kat so I just got in line with them and we talked for a little bit – the line moved really fast. So soon we were all on the boat, I showered for the first time in what felt like days, and went upstairs to eat dinner with Lindsay, Kat, and Meredith. It was so exciting eating with them because we traveled really well together but it was hard to tell if we would ever hang out on the boat / after Japan together. I really like them all though, so I hope that we hang out more in the future. After dinner I went to Open Mic, where anybody can grab the microphone and say stories or experiences they had in the country we just went to. I listened to stories for about an hour and told my story of finding Jon’s uncle’s restaurant. By then, my body wanted to kill me for keeping it up so freaking long and my head was pounding. I popped some advil, drank some water with airborne and slept for 10 hours.

I woke up this morning and had to go to class, and then spent all day studying for my psychology test later that afternoon. Everybody is so drained! We’re all learning so much, but it’s in so many different forms. After everything that had just happened to Japan, it was a little hard to remember what I read in into chapters 2 weeks ago…so I hope I did OK. The classes aren’t that hard, but with everything else that’s going on, I feel like I am busy non stop. But I refuse to get sick! I am always either doing homework, going to meetings or classes, journaling, eating, exercising…really it feels like there is no down time! And it’s crazy, because we’re going to be in China in like a day and people haven’t unwound from Japan nearly enough…we like don’t even have time to get excited cuz there’s no room to breathe! And we’re supposed to read 40 pages on China and another 20 on Hong Kong and that’s just for one of our classes. There’s physically no way that will happen in a day.

Anyway, things are moving so quickly now! I can believe that 3 weeks have gone by, but I don’t know if I’m prepared for how fast the rest will go by. I’m finally starting to really enjoy the people I know here, getting to make good friends, and getting to Japan made me exponentially more excited to get to the other places! But it was like the fastest 5 days of my life, so I just know everything else is going to zoom by. Updates will be more frequent from here on out because we are just tearing through countries for the next month!!

Alright, well I have a million other things that I should do tonight, not sure how much of that is going to happen…and really I just need to go to sleep because if I were anywhere else right now I would be pathetically sick…I’ve just been running on excitement, adrenaline, and…empty. So yeah. Take care all, I’ll write again after China!!!!

Love Hilary