neither me nor jett had ever had the opportunity to travel overseas before, so we started getting the bug. imagine us getting a travel bug. we looked at several different places before something really spoke to us: japan. our bestie for the restie cooper (sorry i said that just then, you guys) has been living over there for a few years now while teaching engrish. he was the best man for our wedding and flew all the way home just to be a part of it. plus, it's japan. so duh. we looked up the flights, did about 100+ hours of math problems and budgeting, cried a little bit, and bought the tickets.
because i work in a dental office, it is easiest for me to plan things out way in advance so that i can just not schedule appointments while i'm gone instead of having to reschedule eight days' worth of toof cleanin's. so we planned this one about seven months out so i would have time to convince my bosses to let me off and enough time to block it off before i schedule appointments. this means that we had seven months to plan the trip, which is great/terrible for me. i did a ton of research and booked a few of our hotels while looking for places to go and things to do. i mean, we had an entire country to choose from.
after several months of planning and dozens of packing lists (i have never been more serious), the time finally arrived for us to pack up and leave home for eleven days. since we were going to be doing quite a bit of train travel, we had to narrow it down to one suitcase a piece. that is really difficult for me, seeing as i probably pack more for a weekend getaway than i did for this whole trip. that probably doesn't mean much, though. the only unfortunate thing was that i was picked up an ugly cold the day before we left, but my doctor sent me with antibiotics and steroids to fight it.
we flew from little rock to dallas to lax before boarding our plane to tokyo. i was extremely disappointed that i did not see any celebrities in lax. i think i'll be okay eventually, but if you all could remember me during this difficult time, i would really appreciate it. we got on our plane to fly twelve hours to narita (tokyo) and got all settled in. i reached down to plug my phone in (we read online somewhere that there were phone chargers on the plane) and... it was a dc outlet that needed a car charger and i had an ac charger and 30% battery life on my phone. so jett told the flight attendants that his wife was ill and he HAD to go buy me medicine so they had to let him off the plane. before you think "oh my god! that is so sweet!" i want you all to consider the fact that jett bought me this phone charger because he knew that i would be pestering him for twelve solid hours if i did not have alternative entertainment. just kidding, it was the most heroic move of all time. ten points to gryffindor.
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| eight hours into the flight |
we left little rock at 6:00am on thursday morning and we arrived in tokyo at 4:00pm on friday, which was about 2:00am at home. we worked our way through customs and finally found cooper patiently awaiting our arrival. let me tell you, if you've ever needed to see a friend before, it's after twenty hours of travel into a foreign land. he led us to currency exchange and to a booth we found online that let us rent a wi-fi hotspot for the week we would be in the country (which was the most amazing and life-saving discovery of all time now and forevermore). then we hopped on what was probably two trains but felt like twelve and dragged our jet-lagged asses to our hostel for the weekend. cooper booked us a private room, which was awesome because i didn't have to worry about some techno-blasting swede watch me sleep. it was a traditional japanese-style room, meaning there were bamboo floors and we slept on mats. they were shockingly comfortable, which may have been related to the fact that i hadn't slept in thirty hours.
but before we went to sleep that night (because we got to the hostel at like 6:00pm), we met cooper's friend mai that lives in the city for dinner. we had originally planned to go to a sushi place, but they were too crowded and i am so glad we ended up here instead! i am also really grateful that we had cooper and mai to translate and order for us. could have been ugly. we decided to go all out and let them order whatever for us. and they went to town. i tried to journal quite a bit throughout the trip, and i wrote down the entire menu for the evening and feel like sharing (and you're reading my blog so you have to read it. HA!):
-carrot + radish relish
-dried potatoes
-edamame (sounds normal so far, right?)
-kimchi, which is a spicy korean cabbage
-bacon (the best ever) with a salad
-cabbage leaves with miso mayo for dipping
-horse... served with a raw egg (the most serious i have ever been)
-sashimi (salmon, squid, mackerel, and tuna)
-bone-in chicken, which was a shocking discovery
-tofu with sea salt + green onion
-dried fish that you ate from the bone (looked like a tim burton movie)
-yebisu, a japanese malt beer
i know a lot of you are probably over a toilet now, but it was all really delicious. there were a few things that i didn't care for, but food is such a huge part of immersing yourself into another culture and why in the hell would you not do that in japan?
so the next day, we started with breakfast in the hostel. side note: they apparently don't eat breakfast in japan. i mean, they eat a morning meal, but it's not breakfast. the hostel had bread so fresh you forgot who you were for a second and hard-boiled eggs, and that was the closest we got to breakfast all week. anyway, we took some trains to asakusa from the hostel, which is a temple in downtown tokyo. there was a festival going on the day we visited, so we got to see a cool parade and take some photos.
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| senso-ji in asakusa |
we wandered through the main road/street vendors and over to the main temple. the smoke you see in the picture above is from the "healing incense" that you are supposed to breathe in for... well healing, obviously. c'mon guys. i mouth-breathed because i was dying of a cold and i'm PREEEEETTY sure that (plus steroids and antibiotics) totally healed me so it's cool; then we drew our fortunes. i drew a "good fortune" and jett drew the "best fortune" from the wall o' fortunes. we were supposed to tie them onto something but we both just pocketed ours, which is sounding like really bad luck as i look back.
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| the boys and their fortunes |
we wandered around a large park in the middle of tokyo and around cooper's favorite lake before stopping for our first real sushi meal. for such tiny people, they really eat a lot in one sitting. it took me some time to get used to eating so much. we then traveled to akihibara "electric town" so jett and cooper could do some gaming while i awkwardly stood by. it was easily the most overwhelming place that anyone has ever been. imagine the loudest, most obnoxious arcade game you can think of. multiply that by fifty and add five stories of it plus indoor smoking and voila! you are in akihibara. the boys could probably each write eight pages on that, but i will move right along. after that, we took a train to harajuku and spent some time looking around the shops and stores and searching for gwen stefani (get it? harajuku girls? oh, nevermind).
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| shibuya crossing |
we stopped at a coffee shop for some espresso and people-watching. the sun was down by 5:00pm over there. it was strange! mai met us again and we all traveled into shibuya (downtown tokyo) for dinner. we crossed through shibuya crossing, which i can't find my video of because my computer lost quite a few of my files. it's an intersection that thousands of people cross through every day and it was cray. see above photo. then we stopped and had dinner at a ramen restaurant. the ramen here is NOT like the ramen back home. it is crazy delicious, though still relatively cheap (especially for tokyo). you pick what you want and buy a ticket before you go in the restaurant and then walk in and hand your ticket over and they bring you your food asap. again, giant portions and very quick eating. plus lots and lots of slurping. then we went back to the hostel for the night and had some strong zero... ask cooper about it.
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| downtown tokyo |
day two (yes, we are just now to day two) consisted of my waking up way too early because jet lag took me like it's own personal bitch, eating eggs and bread at the hostel, then taking a trip to an outer town called kamakura to see daibutsu, the "great buddha" statue. it was about an hour outside of tokyo. we had a delicious lunch at a local restaurant. all of the lunches consisted of something like this: fresh sashimi, soup, salad, pickled something, rice, and a "dessert" like red bean paste. i really enjoyed eating such different food!
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| daibutsu |
we headed back to tokyo after that to meet up with mai to visit the meiji shrine in the heart of tokyo. that's one of the strangest things about tokyo - it is this enormous urban metropolis with thirty billion people that is filled with the tallest buildings and the craziest train system of all time, but there is still a place for the serene, traditional tremples and shrines. it was really wonderful having both cooper and mai for all these situations because they taught us what NOT to do. another of cooper and mai's friends met us as we went to dinner a yakatori restaurant. this is a place where they bring you trays upon trays of raw meat and vegetables plus a little basin of fire for cookin'. i ate more than i'd like to admit at this time.
our final stop for the day was the tokyo sky tree. cooper got tickets for us several months before so we were able to take a trip to the very top of the 350m tower. it's the tallest tower in the world and the second tallest structure if i'm not mistaken (and i probably am so don't fact check me). talk about a view. you could literally see the curvature of the earth in the distance. afterward, we hopped on the last shinkansen (bullet train) and headed toward cooper's hometown of kani.
...and this concludes the first of the japan posts. i have a life, y'all.
i will continue this saga in the next few weeks. sorry to disappoint!
i will continue this saga in the next few weeks. sorry to disappoint!
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