Tokyo Arrival

Well, I’ve had my first night of sleep in Tokyo and I feel rested and ready to take on the day.  I’ve showered in the ultra tiny shower and am waiting for Ben to finish so that we can go down to our free continental breakfast.  Yesterday was a travel marathon.  Once we got to Chicago, we were told that the plane to Tokyo had a water leak and they had to fix it, so we would be delayed 30 minutes.  I thought the worst, but it was really only 30 minutes and we were on our way.  The flight was long, but didn’t feel as long as I expected.  Dan and I sat next to each other and Ben was right in front of me, so he turned around to talk when he got bored.  I worked on a paper for class, then read magazines, watched The Hangover, listened to some podcasts, learned how to count to ten in Japanese using my phrasebook (ichi, ni, san, yon, go, roku, shichi, hachi, ku, ju!) and slept on and off for about two hours.  Dan had a bunch of episodes of Dexter on his iPod and watched those most of the time.  Ben made friends with a young Japanese guy sitting next to him who had just come back from visiting his girlfriend in Chicago.  After we got off of the plane, we changed money and found the train we needed pretty easily.  The machine to buy our ticked was all in Japanese and we were freaked out, but we found an English button eventually.  There was also a really nice man on the plane who talked to us and wrote out how many stops we had (on a napkin) so that we wouldn’t miss our stop.  He told us that he had been to Boston and Washington before, about forty years ago, “before you were even around!” The subway was a little bit of a problem though because when we got there, we got on the wrong train and took it for about four stops before deciding to turn around.  We corrected it and made it to our hotel without any problems.   There was another man on the second train that also asked if we needed help and let us know when we needed to get off.  People here are very polite.

The hotel is in a really cute neighborhood and we explored a bit before finding a noodle shop to have some dinner.  It was alright, but I made the mistake of ordering noodles with seaweed (which is in miso soup, which I like), but the smell made me a little nauseous… very fishy indeed.  Ben and Dan had pork noodles, but the bowls were huge and we were really tired and ready for bed so none of us finished our meals.  On our way back to the hotel, we stopped at an am/pm and found a bin of ice cream treats and they made us laugh because they had softserve cones perfectly packaged in their own plastic containers and a waffle looking thing that was really cake cone material shaped like a waffle and filled with ice cream.  Dan got that.  When we got ready for bed, it was only 10:30pm in Japan, but it was 11:30am at home, which means we had been up for about 28 hours with only a little bit of sleep on the plane.  We all feel much better now and have a full itinerary for today.  I’ll write again tonight!

Subway ticket machine

Ben on the train next to a sleeping guy.

Dan and Ben at the subway stop, right before we got on the wrong train.

Dan and I at the noodle shop.

Seaweed noodles

Dan with his waffle ice cream, in our tiny hotel room!