Japan- Part Dos

Yes, I still love Japan! Aside from everything being really expensive, it is an incredible place. The things that I have seen and done in the last few days have been so great. First of all, my sister says I forgot to talk about the internet cafe really. They are huge here! Right now I am in booth 60 of who knows how many. They also have vending machines with free drinks of almost every kind of soda or coffee you can imagine. If you want, you could buy a beer instead. The seats are super comfy and if you want to pay more you can have a reclining massage chair or a sofa with a flat screen monitor. There are balnkets, showers, toilets with heated seats, and even a tanning booth! You really could live here if you wanted to only eat the ramen noodles or other junk food that they sell. On our last day in Kyoto, we saw some temples and a geisha apprentice girl came and talked to us and danced for us, which was really cool. Then we saw the temple of 1000 buddhas which has (surprise!) 1000 buddhas. After that, Kendall and I left the group to catch our train to Tokyo. The taxi dropped us off by the station at a place where we could do a little shopping and have lunch since we still had an hour or so before we had to get on the train. When we had to cross the street people were looking at us weird because we were giggling so much because the walk signal plays this happy song while you walk across the street. We had to find a post office since thats the only place there are international ATMs, and then we could not figure out where our train was supposed to be, so we had to ask a lady at information. Finally, we figured it out and were on our way. Before we left, we had agreed to meet our friends at the exit of the Tokyo train station. In retrospect, this was possibly one of the worst ideas anyone has ever had being that there are at least 7 main exits. That was like telling someone you would meet them at the exit of Grand Central Station. Needless to say, we didnt find them and were kind of panicking because things were starting to shut down and we didnt know where to stay. We found a Kinkos in the train station and after doing some quick internet research, reserved a hotel close to Disneyland. This was definitely not the cheapest way of doing things, but it was all we could figure out at the time. After doing that, we had to figure out which train took us to the area of Tokyo that we needed to be in. That took us a while, and it ended up being in the 4th level below ground! We finally got off the train, and found a taxi with a driver who spoke no English and didnt understand when we showed him our hotel information. We eventually got things figured out and got into our room ok. The next day we went to DISNEYLAND!!

It was one of the best days of my life. We had so much fun, it's hard to even describe. The people that worked there were so into what they did, it made the whole place just seem so real and magical. It was such a great time, and even more fun to listen to all the stories of the rides in Japanese. It started raining at about the time we were done with everything we wanted to do, and so we headed back to Tokyo to get an earlier train back to Kobe. Once we got back, we had to figure out how to take the subway to the station for our lightrail thing back to the ship. This brough tup the interesting subject of how many forms of transportation we have used on this trip. The list includes: plane, bullet train, regular train, ship, ferry, water taxi, taxi, bus, monorail, motorcycle, rickshaw, trishaw, tuk tuk, walking, tender, and a safari jeep. We almost got on a street car in Hiroshima, but we couldnt figure out how to buy tickets. The next morning, we went to visit the memorial at Hiroshima which was a really powerful experience. I was amazed at how unbiased and fair the information seemed in comparison to the very anti-American feel of the war museum we saw in Vietnam. When we got back to Kobe after that we hung out for a while and ended up at this huge store that had everything from lumber to wedding invitations. It was so fun to look around, but everything was really expensive. We had McDonald's for dinner and I tried a Teriyaki McBurger which was actually very good. Then it was time to head back to the ship. After we got back on the ship we met up with all the people we missed in Tokyo and had a great time just sitting around and talking. I haven't heard of anybody that had a bad time in Japan, everyone loved it. I can't wait to get home, but Japan was so much fun I definitely want to go back soon!