After the excitement of finishing my musical (that's another blog in itself), 2 projects, a final exam, a paper, and my Citi employment forms (for the most part), I was SO ready for my Japanese adventure. We had an early flight on Saturday morning to Nagoya from which we got to ride the bullet train (Shinkansen in Japanese) to Tokyo! When we first stepped off the plane, I shouted out of excitement, "HELLO Tokyo!" (even though we were in Nagoya, whoops!) I thought everything was beautiful already. We then had to figure out how to get to the Nagoya station via subway, not too difficult. At the Nagoya station, we had our first meal of sushi and the waitress was lovely. I assumed everyone didn't speak any English so I had the phrasebook all ready to go - "okanjo-o-kud-a-sai!" (check, please!) She laughed and said, "You speak very good Japanese!" Then we got on the train and I was SOOO pumped because my dad always talked about how cool the bullet train was and it was. I loved just looking out the window as we passed all the rice paddies and little houses. Once we arrived in Tokyo, we were given instructions by our friend Daniel (who was had already been in Tokyo a day) to meet him at the Hachiko dog statue in Shibuya. Well, we somehow made it to Shibuya and it was INSANE! There were so many people and we couldn't figure out how to get out of the station. Laura got so overwhelmed she j
ust stopped in the middle of the bustling crowd and starting crying/laughing with a tomato red face saying, "I can't get out of the way! I can't get out of the way!" So finally we figure out how to get out of the way and out of the station. We get out, and there are MORE people, EVERYWHERE! in all sorts of outfi
ts, chic, high fashion, goth, punks, children, kimonos. So we cross the street with everyone and we're looking for the dog statue. So we decided to ask these young guys we think may speak enough English. They figure out we're talking about a dog and point back toward where we had come from so we go back across the street. Well we're about 20 minutes late and this dog seems to be THE meeting place. There must have been hundreds of people around this silly little dog statue and we could not find Daniel so we watched the crazy, exaggerated people of Tokyo a bit and then decided to just go explore. Daniel said if we didn't find him, we could just meet him at the hostel. So we go diagonally across the street with everyone else because this is a cool looking area and we need a beer (or as they say in Japan - biiru). Everything was so eye-stimulating. We couldn't stop saying, "what is this place? what is going on? who are these people? this is crazy! this is AMAZING!" Turns out, Shibuya Crossing is THE busiest pedestrian crossing IN THE WORLD! Anyway, we found this really cool place, no english, and it's kind of expensive, but oh well! As much as we wanted to keep exploring, we figured we should find Daniel. We manage to get
the subway to our hostel and meet up with Daniel. Our hostel, the Ace Inn, was AWESOME! We each had our own "cubbie hole." It was clean, convenient and had free internet, but the keyboard was a pain because my emails would become Japanese characters randomly and I couldn't figure out how to fix it and I didn't want to be the stupid girl that couldn't figure it out because no one else seems to be typing like a turtle, so my first e-mail was just a long string of letters!
That night we were looking for a restaurant near our hotel. After one failure at a yakitori place that had no English menu, we ended up at the local fast food place. It wasn't bad, but oh well. Afterward, we went to this art exhibit that was on the 53rd floor of a big building to get a view of Tokyo at night. It was definitely a date place. So many couples! We slept well that night after all our travels and looked forward to our breakfast in a cute cafe like we've made travel
tradition!
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