Second Half of Japan

Second half of Japan…

We took the bullet train over to Tokyo, and the ride took about two hours and 45 minutes. And these trains go 230 miles an hour, so we went quite a ways. I was exhausted and tried desperately to sleep, even wrapped my scarf around my head to make it dark, but no sleep would be had. We arrived and stepped into a grand city of lights, traffic, people everywhere, so many signs pointing us in so many different directions.

We had a place booked at the Tokyo International Hostel, but due to really bad planning on Kendra’s part, we didn’t have the address or even the phone number of the place because she didn’t look it up in her email before we left the ship. Great. And the place had a curfew at 11, and it was around 10. We were quickly running out of time and would soon be bedless in Tokyo.

We asked a few taxi drivers to take us there and none of them seemed to know where it was. We wrote it down in English as most Japanese people can read English very well, but when that didn’t work we decided to ask someone to write it down in Japanese for us. We asked three teen-looking kids, two girls and a guy. They turned out to be a blessing of the Tokyo gods. They looked up our hostel on their phone, told us the train would be quicker, looked up our train route for us, helped us buy our tickets, and sent us on our way, telling us to hurry up. Lifesavers. City of miracles.

We got off at our stop at 10:45. Tick tock tick tock. We spotted a policeman and frantically asked him where it was, and he pointed to a large highrise very near us. We quickly made our way over, got to the 18th floor, and rejoiced when we stepped through the doors of our hostel just in time. We cancelled the other two nights we had booked there, because we had thought previously there was no curfew. City of lies. Our guidebook was a liar. The internet was a liar too. So all in all I think we each paid around $45 which is not bad for a night in Tokyo at all.

We got our room keys and listened to the rules. Shower time was over and would begin again from 6:30-8:30 a.m. You had to rent towels. Lights out at 11:30. We had a room just the four of us. Hannah and I sat on the windowsill for awhile and looked out at the city lights. Then we all went upstairs to try and get something to eat. Well, the city of future has vending machines EVERYWHERE. This particular vending machine, you could order any sort of hot food, like hot dogs, fried rice, noodles, French fries. All you had to do was put in your money, wait 60 seconds, and it would pop out piping hot. And… it was yummy.

There were only foreigners staying here, many British people but people from all over the place as well. I used the internet for 15 minutes for a dollar and sat next to some particularly smelly Argentines.

I got on facebook to put my birthday spot on my status so that all of my friends could meet me at the same place. We had decided to go to the Absolut Ice Bar, a bar made completely of ice. I had been planning this for maybe three months, and everyone knew to meet there at 11. So I googled the place to find the address… and it is closed because they are moving locations and won’t open back up again till late April. Awesome. So I write in my status, don’t meet at the ice bar, it is closed, I’ll see you all in Ropungi! No one had any phone service because Japan has all of their own phone and internet services, so I hoped I would at least run into my friends out and about that night.

By midnight I was ready to pass out, so I climbed into bed and pulled my curtains closed and lay my head down on my rice pillow and tried to get comfortable on my inch-thick mattress. I didn’t sleep well again… I lay there for hours and couldn’t have gotten more than two hours of sleep. The light was coming in when I shut my eyes.

Woke up at 8 the next morning, and it was my birthday! HOORAY! I took a shower with a rented towel, and got ready for our day in Tokyo. We stopped to eat at Denny’s because that was an exciting name to see, and we all had great and relatively cheap meals. The sausage was delicious.

All that Kendra cared about on this day was meeting up with her high school friend, who lives in Tokyo, and that basically set the tone for the day. We again didn’t plan very well and didn’t know exactly what we wanted to see or how to get there. If I could do Tokyo over again…

We picked out a couple of places in the map book that looked cool and tried to make our way to them. That was a lot harder than it sounds because we’d have to go to the JR line, have someone tell us what line to get on to get to the area, and once we were in the area, we had to try to find someone that could tell us how to actually walk there, because taxis were far too expensive.

Before we even went somewhere, however, we walked around trying to find a place Kendra could use internet, because she AGAIN didn’t use the internet that was available to us in the hostel to get to her email to write her friend about a meeting time, Very frustrating and a huge time waster. So we walked around, I kept trying to get it on my phone, legitimately a million times, until I finally got it. I stopped dead in my tracks and let her write her friend an email. When that was finally done, we got on with our day.

We decided to go to Tokyo Tower first, which is a replica of the Eiffel Tower, but taller… and in Tokyo. We could see it in the distance, so we just headed in that direction. On our way there we happened onto a beautiful Buddhist temple. I stood in the courtyard and let the cherry blossoms falling off the trees blow by me. It was a beautiful sight. We washed our hands off with freezing cold water to cleanse before entering the hallowed space. The temple was mostly wooden and one of the largest I had seen so far in Japan. Outside were many Buddhist statues and other artifacts. There was one representation of Buddha that I saw most often, with him pointing with one finger on his right hand to the sky. Many flowers adorned this statue. Outside of the temple was almost like a little fair; you could buy several different types of food and souvenirs.

Inside the temple was decorated with brilliant gold, everywhere. Hanging from the ceiling, on the walls, even Buddha himself was rockin’ the gold. And, of course, the incense burned and smelled ever so sweet.

We continued onward and explored a shrine to the right of the temple, as well as a small courtyard area with hundreds of small statues of children, each one decorated with a red bonnet and necktie, and holding a pinwheel. There was something calming and even a little sad looking at them and watching the breeze flow through and each pinwheel in turn spin madly with the gust. I didn’t know what they represented, but Hannah’s blog informed me that they represent the spirit of dead or aborted children. Each statue is identical, with their hands folded as if praying and eyes closed.

I continued to wander around and stumbled on a sort of graveyard area. There was one courtyard surrounded by cherry blossoms with maybe a dozen rather large stone monuments, and I don’t necessarily know what they were for. Each one had a wooden sign near it, and many had flowers on them.

The next area I wandered into I almost certain was a graveyard, but really there is no way of knowing. There were hundreds of stone monuments, maybe four of five feet tall, with Japanese writing. They were usually smooth and glazy, and I suppose they hold urns. Many were decorated with flowers. Most had several wooden pegs propped up behind them, all with Japanese writing on them. I wish I had someone there who could tell me what I was looking at. I got one great picture of the cherry blossoms flurrying in the wind, falling all over the stones.

We walked out of that area and came along a little stream surrounded by foliage and went climbing around a little. There were so many little random beautiful spots like that in Japan.

Finally we were at the tower, which was pretty cool, just picture the Eiffel Tower painted orange and white. Outside there was this crepe shop. You could fill the crepes with ice cream, sauce, fruit, deliciousness, and I couldn’t wait to get one as soon as I was out of the tower. Also, I was on a mission to get boba tea.

We bought a ticket for about eight dollars to go up. The view was pretty awesome, but I know it would have been even better at night. I walked all the way around a couple times, checked out all the sights, and looked down at the area where the floor was clear. They had these cool video screens where you could see the view progress for 24 hours in high speed. What a beautiful city, the night view is spectacular.

After exploring, we went downstairs where they had a bunch of shops and food. I didn’t buy anything because the prices were outrageous, but I was definitely tempted. The smallest, teeniest, cheapest P.O.S. Hello Kitty keychain was eight dollars. How does anyone afford to live in Tokyo??

When we got back to the bottom, I got my very own delicious crepe filled with strawberry ice cream, strawberry sauce, and delicious banana. Yum.

I really wanted to go see the Shinto Shrine after this, but Kendra’s personal itinerary called again, and we headed to the train station to go meet her friend Mary. We caught a train to an area, met up with Mary, Mary and Kendra had their sweet reunion, then we caught a train right back to where we just came from. Annoying. Sorry for the enormous amount of bitterness in this blog, but you know what, I am bitter. Mary wasn’t that friendly, was pretty boring, wouldn’t let me use her call phone when I needed to call my friend, and she just wasn’t a good host in general. Thanks for nothing.

So we headed to the Harajuku district to see all of the Harajuku girls and their wicked style. Everything Gwen Stefani ever sang about was absolutely true. The clothes were insane. And insanely expensive. It’s basically a huge shopping district, and I had a lot of fun looking around, but I can buy expensive clothes back in the US. It was fun to explore, though. I took lots of pictures of the girls all dressed up; wigs of ever color and style, bright leggings, crazy heels, posh jackets, fake eyelashes, the works. Apparently every Sunday the “fashion gangs” come out and hang out on street corners so people can take pictures of them. I want to start a fashion gang. We would wear pajamas.

I got especially excited when I saw a girl with bubble tea! She pointed me in the direction she got it, and Hannah and Adrienne and I all got delicious boba. Birthday wish granted.

I got internet on my phone again and was so excited to see that I had a message from Chris Cooke. He went to Damien for high school and was in a band called Winds of Plague. I knew of him, he was friends with a few of my friends. He went to UCSD and became really good friends with Fran, which is where I met him and hung out with him several times. He said that we should definitely hang out and he gave me a meeting place and time to meet him. Finally, we might be able to meet up with someone fun! So Hannah, Adrienne and I left Kendra and Mary behind and headed to Shibuya to meet Chris.

We arrived a little before our meeting time and waited for a little while, until there he was with his bike! I ran up to him and hugged him, it was so cool to be hanging out with someone from home. He is studying in Tokyo for a year. He’s been there for about nine months. Next year he’s finishing up his senior year at UCSD, so I can hang out with him at home too! I thought it was so nice of him to message me, even though we have only hung out a few times. Adrienne, Hannah, Chris, and I all go to school in San Diego, so we talked about San Diego a LOT which was really nice, and I talked about Fran for about three hours straight.

He was a great host. We told him we wanted some good, cheap sushi and he immediately took us over to a place. Mary, on the other hand, had told us, when we told her we wanted sushi, that “she never at sushi in the city.” Oh.

The sushi place was pretty cool. All of the sushi was on a conveyer belt and you just picked what you wanted. You could tell the price of the dish by the plate design. Chris grabbed glasses and started filling them with tea like he owned the place, then he told us what each sushi was as it conveyed by. It was really cool listening to him speak Japanese. He had to pause sometimes when talking to us because it had been so long since he spoke English, which pretty much blew my mind. The sushi was delicious, and I tried everything, even eel. Oh and I eat jellyfish in China, I keep forgetting to write about that haha. Adrienne ate twenty dollars worth all by herself, while Hannah and I each paid about six. That’s my girl, Adrienne.

Chris took us around the area a little and showed us this one shop that was insane. The minute I walked in I saw it… a full body panda suit. I had to have it. Life just wouldn’t be the same knowing there was a panda suit somewhere in the world that wasn’t mine. So I did buy it, and it is the best purchase I have made on SAS. Second best purchase… my panda hat from China. The rest of the shop was nuts, all sorts of crazy clothes, fake nails, electronics, stuffed animals, anything you could want really.

We headed back towards the train station to meet up with Kendra and Mary, since Adrienne and Kendra had split a locker and we all needed to change clothes for the evening’s festivities. We got our stuff and got dolled up. I wore a black dress, black tights, gold heels, and little tiger ears I had purchased for a dollar to signify that I was the birthday girl.