Japan-tastic!

Hi all!
It’s been a little while sine I’ve had a chance to write a new blog! It’s been a busy few days. We arrived in Kobe, Japan on Friday morning. It was a VERY long process to get off the ship. Normally we just have to wait for an immigration officer to come on board and stamp all 700 of our passports, but Japan has pretty strict rules about entering the country. So we woke up at 7am, had to be dressed and ready to go by 7:45 when they took attendance to make sure we were all ready, then we had to have our temperature taken (to make sure we weren’t bringing any diseases into Japan, I guess!), after everyone’s temperature was taken and we were all deemed healthy enough to visit Japan, they lifted the ship’s “quaranteen”status, then we went back down to our rooms and waited for a while until they were ready to let us off the ship, then we got off the ship, waited in line to go through security and have them check our passports and take our fingerprints! Then finally after all of that which took several hours…we were allowed to run free in Japan! Haha. I had an SAS trip to a temple in Kyoto to participate in a tea ceremony. That was really fun!! It was a 2 hour bus ride to get there, then we got to walk around the are a little bit and got a tour of the temple, then we got a traditional tea ceremony. It was a very interesting process and experience. I didn’t like the tea itself, it was green and foamy and kind of tasted like spinach, haha but I had a great time at the ceremony. So that was my first day in Japan.

Unfortunately I caught some kind of cold and cough which I’m still fighting off so I went to bed early and slept late my second day. Then I walked around downtown Kobe for a while my second day and got to see what Japanese people and culture is like! The younger generation is really “stylish” and modern. I guess that’s the best way to describe them. The guys have hilarious hairstyles that’s basically just messy hair like they just woke up, but the put gel and mousse in it to keep it looking that way. And the girls dress up for everything, all the time. A typical outfit is many layers of shirts reaching almost to their knees, leggings, and boots or heels.

My second evening in Japan a group of 10 friends and I traveled to Tokyo via an overnight bus. It was an uncomfortable night of very little sleep but it was an experience for sure! And it was fun with that many of us. We got to Tokyo at 7am and we spent that entire day at TOKYO DISNEYLAND! It was so much fun!! We all ran around like little kids, riding the rides and taking pictures with the disney characters! We spent a total of 12 hours at Tokyo Disney, which is still hard to believe, haha. It was a great but totally exhausting day, especially since we hadn’t slept much the night before. After Disneyland we got to know the Tokyo subway system quite well. We took several subways and trains to get to our hostel. We checked in, dropped our stuff off and found some dinner. After that we were all too tired and full to do anything so we went back to the hostel and slept. Then today, our second day in Tokyo, we got up and had a McDonald’s breakfast, then we went around the city to see what we could see! We went to a market, and a temple, and up to the top of a tall building to see the view and after walking around most of the day we then took many more subways and trains to get to Yokohama, where our ship traveled to while we were in Tokyo. So we met up with our ship this evening, and from what I’ve seen of Yokohama so far it looks really nice! It seems very pretty, clean, relaxed…so I’m looking forward to looking around here a bit tomorrow. Then tomorrow evening we all leave Yokohama on the ship. We then spend 9 days at sea and on Thanksgiving day we arrive in Hawaii!

So I have enjoyed Japan SO much so far. I love it here. Here’s a list of things I’ve discovered about Japan so far:
1.      They like Christmas for the lights and music and whatnot, so they’ve got the cities all decked out with Christmas trees and lights and reigndeer and everything
2.      They have very complicated toilets that have remote controls with buttons to do things like warm the seat, rinse and dry your butt, flush the toilet, make the flushing sound (that’s separate from actually flushing, haha!!!) and several other features which I can’t remember now. But let’s just say it’s not an easy thing to use the bathroom in Japan and just figuring out which button flushes the toilet is a task. Fortunately though, there’s also a button you can push to call for help. Hah!
3.      They’re stylin’! (Even the babies are better dressed than I am)
4.      Japanese men like to wear bags that pretty much look like purses
5.      Things in Japan are EXPENSIVE!
6.      Really entertaining snacks in the convenience stores
7.      They have vending machines for everything from hot coffee to hamburgers!
8.      Starbucks everywhere…
9.      They like Obama :-)
10.     They do the peace sign with their fingers in all their photos…even the little kids do it!

And much, much more. That’s about all I’ve got for this blog entry. Pretty much it seems like Japan is more like America than most of the countries I’ve visited, but in many ways it’s also way different. Same…but different. That sums it up. Hahaha.

I hope you’re all doing well! I’ll post new pictures as soon as I can!