Japan...9 days later

day 1:

The process to get into Japan was intense. In the morning we had to walk in front of an infrared camera that took our pictures. Then they called us by floor to get off the ship and wait in a line to get our passports stamped in person (they usually just do it in a room on the ship before we get off) and to get our fingerprints read electronically. My floor got really lucky and was the first floor called off after the faculty. It was also really lucky that everyone I was traveling with (me, Tara, Sarah, Kaeleigh, and Alyte) are all on the same floor. The line was soooo long and moved soooo slowly, so I really don’t know how we would have accomplished any of our plans if we hadn’t been first. When we finally got through the line, which took almost an hour, we took the train so we could get our JR train pass receipts exchanged and then got on the bullet train to Hiroshima. It was about an hour and a half ride. When we got off at the Hiroshima station, we had to figure out how to get to the museum. We ended up taking a bus to the park that the museum sits in. We saw the a-bomb dome, which is a building that was burned and destroyed from the inside during the bombing but didn’t really have much structural damage, which is weird because pretty much everything else in that area was destroyed. The Peace Memorial Park was beautiful; I didn’t expect there to be so many other things to look at other than the museum, but there really was. We could have spent a lot longer in the park but we knew we were kind of on a time crunch for the day so we went to the museum. I expected it to be comparable to the Holocaust museum in DC but I thought it was a lot more intense. They showed pictures of peoples skin burning off and other grotesque images that I just thought were more intense than the Holocaust museum. After the museum we took a ferry to Miyajima, an island really close to Hiroshima that has a famous Shinto shrine in the water. Miyajima itself was a cute little town – it was really pretty because the sun was setting and I wish we could have stayed longer. We only got to spend about an hour there, but if there was one hour we were going to spend there we picked a really good hour because of the sunset. Deer were all over the place there, which seemed more like another famous Japanese town called Nara with a lot of deer, but apparently in the Shinto religion deer are considered messengers of the gods. There were a lot of funny signs about the deer. We knew there was a ferry at 6:45 and one a few minutes later to take us back to Hiroshima, so we weren’t in that much of a rush to get back, but we did have to stay kind of on top of time because we had already bought tickets to Kyoto for later. We missed the 6:45 ferry and noticed that the second one actually didn’t come until 7:00. Even though that was only a few minutes difference from what we expected, we started to get nervous that we wouldn’t get to the train station in time. After we got off the ferry we ran to the train that would take us back to the JR station with the bullet trains. We knew that once we got to the JR station, we would have to go downstairs to get our luggage that we had left in lockers and then go back upstairs to catch our train to Kyoto. We got to the JR station with about 5 minutes until our train, ran downstairs, ran back upstairs with backpacks on, and caught our train. I’ve never done so much running to catch a form of public transportation. The train to Kyoto was about 2 hours long so we had a lot of time to BS and do nothing. All throughout the day we had been trying funny Japanese snacks (Japan has the best snacks) and we had been pretty lucky with them except for Kaeleigh. She was constantly buying the weirdest looking things and they were always nasty. She bought something on the train that had picture of little furry candies on the bag. I think they were supposed to be some kind of picture of a nut but I don’t know. She went to put one in her mouth and said they smelled really bad and didn’t know if she could eat it. Everyone agreed they smelled bad but since I can’t smell I volunteered to taste them and decide if they actually tasted bad – they were terrible. I don’t think anyone else even tried them. Kaeleigh gave them to a woman sitting behind us, who seemed really excited about it, so maybe it’s an acquired taste. We got to Kyoto around 10:00. Me, Kaeleigh, and Alyte really wanted to get to the hotel and put our stuff down. Sarah and Tara didn’t want to pay for a cab to the hotel so they took a train that our JR passes could be used for. The 3 of us got there first and I went to check into the hotel and they came up to the desk with me. I had only reserved the hotel for 2 people because the extra person fees were ridiculous. I guess I should have only had 2 of us go to the desk but I hadn’t really thought about it because I’ve always booked hotels for less people than actually show up. We had a 4 person room with 2 small beds and 2 couches, so we figured the 5^th person could just squeeze in a bed or something like that. The 3 of us get up to the desk and the guy is asking why there are 3 of us instead of 2 so I made something up about why she had to stay with us last minute. He said it was going to cost $35 a night to put an extra bed in the room. I asked him if it was $35 for an extra PERSON or an extra BED and he said extra bed. I was worried what we would have to pay if he found out 5 people were staying in the room, and also confused why it would cost that much for a bed if there were 2 couches in the room too. I tried to tell him one of us would sleep on a couch but he didn’t know the word couch so it took a minute for me to realize I had to use the word sofa. He said that wasn’t allowed. I started getting really annoyed and said that I shouldn’t have to pay for an extra bed if we aren’t ASKING for an extra bed. I told him we would just share a bed and he looked really uncomfortable for a minute and then said “that is not permitted in our hotel.” When he said that, I remembered when we were trying to book a capsule hotel in Tokyo us noticing that a lot of capsule hotels won’t even allow women to stay there. Apparently they are really weird in Japan about where women can sleep in proximity to men, but apparently we also “aren’t permitted” to share a bed. I was exhausted and exasperated at this point so I just said I would pay the fees in cash when I checked out but that I didn’t want it on my credit card. Sometime during this time Kaeleigh and Alyte had to go meet Sarah and Tara outside and keep them from coming in. After the hotel had copied our passports and whatever, I went outside, got Sarah and Tara’s bags, put them in our room, and we all went to find something to eat. We went to some weird place that is some version of Japanese fast food. Apparently they have chains of them on the west coast in the USA. I ate a weird bowl of rice with weird bacon and onions on top. It was actually really good. We went back to the hotel and walked in separately without a problem. A lot of Asians have told us this semester that all Americans look the same to them so we didn’t think we would have a problem with the hotel catching the fact that 5 of us were coming in as long as we didn’t walk in together. The hotel was really nice and it sucked that it was such a hassle to check in because we couldn’t fully enjoy how nice it was since we were so annoyed.

day 2:

We got up early and took the train to the main part of Kyoto. We really wanted to see a geisha show and we were there at a good time because most of the legit places only have them in April during cherry blossom season. We had looked up one place that was supposedly really famous that sells cheap tickets every morning at 10:00. On our way there we weren’t 100% positive which train stop to get off so we asked a woman on the train. She was kind of older and was with 3 friends and they looked like old-woman versions of the Sex and the City people. She was really cute and friendly and she told us where to go and then she was like, “I’m going there too..you come with me.” So when the stop came she stood up to remind us to get off and herded us off the train like a little mother hen. We told her we didn’t really have plans for the day and we pulled out a map of Kyoto and asked her what she would do if she were us. She said that there was an area that was really pretty during cherry blossom season and there was a nice park there and stuff. We thanked her and left the station and started looking for the geisha place. We got there around 9:30 and waited around until we could buy our tickets. The show was at 2:00 so we walked around for awhile. We searched for a bank where Sarah could exchange her South African money, which was actually really hard to find, and then we walked down a pedestrian street that had a lot of shops and restaurants and stuff. We really wanted sushi for lunch so we asked around about a place to get it and someone finally pointed one out to us. It was a really cool sushi bar and it was the kind where things just went by all the tables on a conveyer belt and you picked up what you wanted. There were a few pieces on each plate and each plate cost about $1, a little more or less depending on what it was. It was kind of weird not to know what anything was, but some stuff you could guess better than others. If you specifically wanted something that you didn’t see coming by, you could order it on a touch screen above your table and it would come by on this separate conveyer belt and stop at your table. We called it the JR train because it looked like the bullet trains we had been taking from city to city. You took it off the train and pushed a button and the train went back to the kitchen. After lunch we went back to the geisha place for the show. The show has been going on for over 100 years so I felt like we were seeing something pretty authentic. The show was really cool, but some man in front of us actually laid down and fell asleep. The show was surprisingly not touristy at all; we might have been the only white people there. After the show we went to the park that the woman from the train had recommended and it was SO pretty. It was a lot bigger than I expected and there was also a cherry blossom festival going on so there were a lot of people around. It was really nice and probably one of my favorite things we did the whole time. There was sooo many food stands there. We stopped and got ice cream – I had banana flavored which was bangin but Kaeleigh tried “cherry blossom” flavor which was surprisingly good. For once her tasting of weird food paid off. Something I noticed about Japanese people is that, while Chinese people want to take pictures WITH you, Japanese people just want to take pictures OF you. It is really weird to have someone come up to you and just ask to take your picture. If it happened in the United States I would be legitimately creeped out, but in other countries I guess you feel like you have to be pleasant to people, plus Asians are always telling us how beautiful we are. Plus, when you think about it, if you said no they would probably do it anyway when you weren’t paying attention, which is even creepier, so you might as well say yes and at least smile for the picture. Some guy came up to Kaeleigh and I eating our ice cream and asked to take our picture sooo it’s kind of weird to think that some Japanese man has a picture of my friend and I with ice cream cones in our hands. We actually ran into that same man 2 times later that day. At one point he saw me taking a picture of a cherry blossom and he said “do you like that cherry blossom?” If someone said that to me in the USA I would probably say something really sarcastic like, “no I just always take pictures of things I hate.” But, because by this point it is a relief to find anyone willing to speak English, I said, “yeah I really like it! I like that it’s pink and not white like a lot of the other ones.” He said, “it’s beautiful” and I said “yes it is” and he said “but, YOU are much MORE beautiful.” I love Asians. Anyway, after getting some ice cream we sat down on some benches. There was a food stand nearby but we weren’t planning on eating anything. All of the sudden a guy from the food stand came up to us with this food…I can’t really describe it, Japanese people eat weird things, but it was like multicolored dough balls on sticks. They were all in little to-go boxes and there was a box for each of us. We were really confused and he gestured to some guy that was sitting behind us. This guy was middle-aged and relatively creepy looking. But, we didn’t think much about it – people in China and Japan have liked talking to us, they have wanted to take pictures with us/of us, so we didn’t think it was that weird that some guy would want to watch us enjoy a Japanese snack. We smiled and said thank you and waved at him and whatever. We weren’t really hungry but we started to eat it to be polite. Five minutes later the guy from the food stand comes up to us with another similar snack. We were not excited at the idea of force-feeding ourselves more food but we smiled and said thank you again. The guy who was buying us food started chain smoking and watching us eat. A few minutes later the guy from the food stand comes over with cans of green tea. I think only one person in our group even likes green tea. I personally thinks it tastes like dirty water. But, we smiled at him and said thank you. We saw him pay the food-stand guy for the food so we thought it was over. Then the chain-smoking food-buying semi-creepy Japanese man came over to us and tried to talk to us but he didn’t speak very good English. He asked where we were from and we told him and we thanked him for the food and took a picture with him and then he said something that we couldn’t understand, but we could tell it was some kind of question. Most of the time when Japanese people had been asking us questions they had been something along the lines of “are you enjoying your time here?” but we had no idea what this guy said. My friend Sarah, in an effort to just keep the pseudo-conversation moving, smiled and said “yeah!” Then he says, “Japanese noodles!” and walked away. We knew then that Sarah had just accepted more food. The food-stand guy came over a few minutes later with plates of noodles. The noodles weren’t even good, they were really bland. We really didn’t want to eat them but we felt obligated since someone in our group had apparently said yes to them. We then see our creeper talking to the food-stand guy. Food-stand guy comes over and you can tell he doesn’t REALLY want to ask us this but he says, “do you guys speak Japanese?” and we said no and he kind of laughed awkwardly and said, “that guy….he wants to know if you want any beer.” All five of us said an adamant “NO!” He kind of laughed and was like, I didn’t think so. He goes over to our creeper and relays the message and our creeper continues to chain smoke and watch us eat. He came back over to us a little while later for some more broken English conversation and he pantomimed drinking beer to us, we said no (again) and he talked to us for a few more minutes and then said goodbye and walked away. We stopped shoving food in our mouths and relaxed a little but then he returned to his post for more cigarettes. He walked away again a few minutes later and my friend Tara swears she saw him make a masturbation motion to his friend…GROSS! We decided it was time to leave the bench and any location within a 500 foot radius of him. We saw him later with two Japanese girls that were possibly younger than us, sooo he clearly just likes young girls, regardless of their nationality. Sometime during this feast of somewhat gross Japanese foods, we saw a woman pull an oversized rabbit out of her purse…the rabbit was wearing a dress – weird. We walked around the park some more and there was a guy playing a guitar and singing American songs. He was selling CDs and I kind of wanted to buy one so during one of his breaks I went over and talked to him for a minute. He is from Boston and I asked him what he was doing in Japan and he said, “I’ve been hear for 20 years! Right here doing this same thing in this same spot!” I’m not really sure how one makes a living selling CDs in English, in a country where English is not only not the native language, but is also more expensive than the countries where English IS the native language, but I didn’t really ask. He had some chips with him that he was feeding to the ducks and he let me feed them and the ducks ate right out of my hand. My friend was afraid they would bite her and he said “Everyone thinks that…why does everyone think that?” ummm because they are ducks, not cats. I’m pretty sure he was a little bit of the hippie but that’s ok, he was nice. He said he meets semester at sea people all the time and he asked where else we have left on our trip. He said that the people in Guatemala are the nicest people I’ll ever meet and I said that so far Japanese people were the nicest and he said Guatemala doesn’t even compare so we’ll see about that. We looked in a guidebook we had and saw that “one of the prettiest streets in Asia” was supposedly right by the park so we went there. I’ll agree -it was really pretty. When we got to the end of the street, we walked down another street along a river to get to the train station. We took a train back to where our hotel was and instead of taking a taxi back to the hotel (it was a few minutes from our station) we walked back because the weather was nice. It was about a 45 minute walk but it was nice and we stopped at a grocery store on the way and stocked up on weird snacks.


day 3:

We got up and checked out of our hotel. Before we checked out, we picked up a $10 voucher from the hotel for not getting our room cleaned the day before that could be used at the convenience store or restaurant. Sooo I’m paying $70 for two nights to not share a bed with a girl, but you’re going to pay me $10 to not have a hotel maid go through my stuff? Makes sense. We went to the train station and put our stuff in a locker like we did the first day. We went to the Golden Temple, which is probably the most famous Temple in Kyoto because it is literally painted in gold. It was only mildly impressive; if it hadn’t been for the gold paint it wouldn’t have been much of anything. It was in a really pretty area though. We decided not to go to the other two temples near it because you had to pay to see each one separately and we figured if the most impressive one didn’t seem that cool to us, the other ones couldn’t have been all that great. We went to the train station figuring we would go back to the main Kyoto station and hang around there until it was time for our train to Tokyo, but as we were about to go in Kaeleigh realized she couldn’t find her rail pass. Her and Alyte decided to try to look for it or try to convince someone to give them a new one and they told Sarah, Tara, and I that since we all had already bought our tickets to Tokyo they would just meet us at that train. The guidebook we had said that the Kyoto station was supposed to be pretty famous, and that people sometimes go to it as some kind of attraction. It was pretty much like a mall inside, which was cool but only because it was technically a train station. The shops themselves weren’t anything worth putting in a guidebook, but maybe by now I’m just getting picky about what I consider to be cool sights. We ate at a sandwich place which was amazing because I barely ever get to eat sandwiches this semester and when I do they are nasty ship sandwiches and the bread is hard or the meat is weird or something else is wrong with it. We went to our train platform and found Kaeleigh and Alyte, who had found Kaeleigh’s rail pass. Someone had turned it in to the lost and found, which is indicative of how nice Japanese people are. Sarah said she had heard that Japanese lost and founds are crazy and that people turn EVERYTHING in, but we didn’t know if she would actually find a rail pass. Technically it would only have been of use to a foreigner anyway because Japanese people aren’t allowed to use them, but in the USA if we had something that was only of use to foreigners and someone found it, they would have kept it for themselves and sold it. So, that was really lucky because rail passes are impossible to buy in Japan and she would have basically been screwed. The train to Tokyo took 2 ½ hours. We wanted to stay in a capsule hotel our first night because that’s supposedly a famous thing to do, but we could only get 4 spaces in a capsule hotel and after everything that had happened with our hotel room being so weird about sharing beds, we decided it wasn’t worth getting to Tokyo late at night and possibly not having a place to stay. Earlier that morning while we were still at the Kyoto hotel, we had used a computer there to find a hostel online. The hostel was cheaper than the capsule and it had room for 5 people so we cancelled our capsule reservation and booked 2 nights at the hostel. Kaeleigh and I were pretty much the ones dealing with the computer while Sarah and Alyte got our stuff together and Tara had gotten up early to walk to the train station since it was nice out and for exercise. It was already getting past the time we told Tara we would meet her so we were kind of in a rush. We printed out the directions to the hostel from the train station – it was supposedly within walking distance. The map printed out on one page but then the actual directions wouldn’t print. Kaeleigh brought up the fact that maybe the printer was out of black ink so we printed them in blue and it worked. Under the heading about walking directions it said, “for walking directions please refer to the map on hostelworld.com” which we had already printed, so we grabbed the papers and left. When we got to the area right outside Tokyo where the hostel was around 9:00 and left the train station, we did what we usually had been doing to get places and showed the map to someone at the train station and had them point us in the right direction. We got outside and showed someone else the map and they seemed kind of confused. No one recognized the name of the hostel or could read the map. The map was so zoomed out that the actual area from the train station to the hostel was probably 20 times smaller than the actual map, so I don’t know who put that map on there. Someone in our group asked Kaeleigh and I what the address was and we realized we didn’t have it because it was supposed to print out under the map in black ink. Since the map itself had printed we didn’t even think to check if anything else should have been on that page. We were all tired and hungry and sick of carrying our luggage, so while we were looking for the place everyone got a little hostile. (pun intended..?) Kaeleigh and I could tell that everyone was secretly blaming us for not being able to find it and eventually I got sick of that and announced to everyone, “Look, I know we fucked up and we should have checked to make sure we had the address, but this isn’t the end of the world. We’re going to find it – we know we’re in the right place – so let’s just keep asking people until someone knows where it is.” We walked around for over an hour looking for it and asking people that had no clue what we were talking about, and eventually we asked two young women who spoke some English and since we could communicate better with them than with other people we had asked, they made it their mission to help us. (Sidenote: Japanese people are insanely helpful. When we searched for a bank that would exchange Sarah’s South African Rand, if we asked someone in a store or something where a bank was, instead of just telling us they would get up, walk outside with us and physically point us in the right direction. If they didn’t know the answer to our question, they would make us sit down and wait until they found a coworker that could. They genuinely want to find a way to answer your question, and they refuse to accept the idea of not being able to help you.) One woman got on her cell phone and started texting or looking stuff up until she found the phone number of the hostel. The other woman rode her bicycle a little bit ahead of us to try to see if she could find it herself. When she got the number we called them on Kaeleigh’s phone and since the hostel caters to foreigners, the guy spoke good English but we still couldn’t get a straight answer out of him. She asked him for the address and he said “that won’t help you, there’s no street signs where you are” (which made us feel less dumb for not having the address). We didn’t really know what to say to that so we asked the woman if she would talk to him and she got on the phone and spoke Japanese with him. The next thing we knew, we were standing in the middle of the street waiting for him to come get us himself. He made a snide comment when he got there about how we should have had a map…we had THE map that his site said to refer to and it sucked so that was an unnecessary comment. We still hadn’t eaten dinner so we offered to buy the women dinner or a drink or something. We could tell the woman who had used her cell phone kind of wanted to but the woman on the bike didn’t think it was a good idea, even though they only spoke Japanese to each other, but they ended up not coming with us. We checked into the hostel and then were led to our rooms. I’ve only stayed in one hostel ever, and that was earlier this semester in Spain so maybe I’m not the hostel expert, but everyone I was with besides Sarah had stayed in several before, so I feel like I’m not exaggerating when I say that this was one of the most ridiculous hostels ever. It wasn’t dirty or anything, which I guess was a good thing, but hostelworld.com is a pretty reputable website and usually if something is on there it isn’t too bad. This hostel was situated in a two story house. Our “rooms” were upstairs and we had to walk up the outside stairs to get there. When we got there, we all stood in a small area that apparently serves as the kitchen, sink to brush your teeth in because the toilet is a squatty potty with no sink, computer area, and place to take your shoes off. Tara was in the front of the line and the guy that owned the hostel was in the back and he said our rooms were to the left. We said, “Tara, turn left.” She said, “I can’t.” It was getting pretty late by this point and we just wanted to put our stuff down and find food so we weren’t really in the mood for any of this. We were like “Tara…turn DOWN THE HALL AND GO LEFT.” She said, “I CAN’T. THIS ISN’T A HALLWAY.” We looked…she was pretty much right. The “walls” in this hostel were made of plywood and a big piece of plywood was blocking anyone from going down the “hallway.” The guy made his way to the front of the line and opened the “door” that was blocking our way and led us to our “rooms.” I really can’t explain this hostel without pictures and video, and even if I post a picture it won’t REALLY describe the situation. It was obvious that this area used to be one big room and they had used plywood to separate it into “private rooms.” We had booked a 3 person room and a 2 person room. The “door” to me, Kaeleigh, and Alyte’s room was a sliding door, that felt like it could just come off at any second. The “door” to Sarah and Tara’s room was a hinged piece of plywood, so it couldn’t be opened if anyone was standing near our room. We could barely get in our rooms with our bags because of how the rooms were set up. When you got in the rooms, there were “bunk beds” if that’s what you want to call them considering one bed was actually just on the floor. There was literally just enough room to stand next to the bed and to climb up on the ladder. If you wanted to put your stuff on the floor, there would literally be no room to walk. The “walls” didn’t even extend floor to ceiling. I was on the top bunk so I could look over the wall into Sarah and Tara’s room which was funny because we knew each other but if we had been strangers it would have been SO creepy. We went out to find something to eat and ended up eating at that same weird fast food place that we ate at our first night in Kyoto. On the way back, we saw a bar called “Homies Bar” which is obviously too funny of a name not to stop in. Kaeleigh and I kind of wanted to have a drink after the ridiculous night we had had and everyone else said they would come check it out but didn’t really want to drink anything. We walked in and it was two bartenders and two or three other Japanese people at the bar. It looked like a Japanese version of Cheers. Kaeleigh wanted Bailey’s on the rocks and I wanted to try something random so I picked something called Passoa, which looked like a liqueur similar to Bailey’s. Trying to order was pretty funny – we ended up having to write the things we wanted down on a piece of paper because they couldn’t understand us when we said them out loud and when we tried to point everyone laughed at us. The Passoa was really good – I don’t know if you can find it in the USA, but I’m going to try. The drink was ridiculously overpriced so we only got one and then we left Homies and went back to the hostel.

day 4:

We went to the Sony Building in the Ginza district of Tokyo which was cool. We played with some technological gadgets. Apparently it was on everyone’s list of things to do because we ran into Megan and Jordan and while we were talking to them we ran into Nicky Thomas and Kevin. Nicky told us about a restaurant they had been to the night before called The Lockup, which was supposedly a jail-cell-themed restaurant where you sit on the floor and your drinks come out in chemistry containers and every now and then they turn the lights off to scare you and whatever. It sounded cool so we decided to go later. We left the Sony Building first because the 5 of us had gotten there before everyone we ran into and we found another sushi bar. It was similar to the other one but a lot less fancy. It was good though. After we ate we went to a park, got ice cream, and sat on a bench and watched children for over an hour. It was nice to sit and do nothing. There was one little girl whose parents were obviously just trying to exhaust her. She was chasing pigeons and whenever one would escape her and she would give up her parents would point one out on the opposite end of the park so she would run after it. At one point, he lifted her up so she could flail around and try to catch some in a tree. It was so obvious that they were thinking, “she’s going to sleep well tonight!” After we sat in the park for awhile we took the train back to our hostel to get ready to go out for the night. We went to the Shibuya district of Tokyo because that’s where The Lockup was and it was crazyness. It was like NYC on crack. We found The Lockup and walked inside and the path to the hostess stand was like a haunted house. They led us to our cell and we sat on the ground and looked at the menu. The menu had one page of the fun drinks in the chemistry containers with pictures so it was easy to point to what you wanted. The food part of the menu also had pictures so we ordered what appeared to be taco rice. Whatever it was it was really good. Our drinks tasted really good and were really funny, but they didn’t taste like they had any alcohol in them. We hadn’t been out for drinks at all in Japan (except for the few minutes in Homies) so we kind of wanted to drink a little and didn’t want to pay a lot for “alcoholic” drinks that didn’t really have any alcohol. We tried to ask our servers (you didn’t really get one specifics server at this place) about things on the menu but they had some weird refusal to speak English. I don’t know if it was supposed to contribute to the scaryness or what but it was kind of annoying. I don’t expect people to know English in these places we have been, but when it is obvious they DO know it and are refusing to speak it to help you, that’s weird and frustrating. We would try to ask them a question about the menu and they would act confused like they didn’t understand, but when we would ask them other questions in English they would answer in English. We had conversations such as, “Do you speak English?” “No, I don’t speak English.” Or, a personal favorite, Tara started asking everyone their names and they would answer her, which proved they understood the question, and then we would guilt them into answering our other questions. But, one time she asked someone, “What’s your name?” and she responded, “No name, sorry.” Ok, not only did you clearly understand the question because you were able to answer it, but it is impossible that you have NO name, especially since you are wearing a NAME tag. We didn’t say that because we were laughing too hard at the ridiculousness of the situation. Anyway, we kept trying to ask them if any of the funny drinks had alcohol in them and they claimed they did, which I doubt, but then they pointed to one in particular and said it was “VERY strong.” We didn’t want to order a bunch of really strong drinks and have them be nasty so we just ordered one for us all to split just so we could try it. We got it and we all tried a sip of it; it was pretty gross and tasted like lemon vodka. We left the rest of it in the middle of the table so whoever wanted more of it could take it, but a few minutes later they turned the lights out blasted scary music and people came into the cells to scare us and it was SO unexpected because we had been there for awhile without it happening that as soon as they turned the lights out we all screamed and Alyte threw her arms out and knocked over the one strong drink we actually had. After we finished our taco rice, we figured we could just order drinks off the regular mixed-drink menu and accept the fact that it wouldn’t come out in fun cups, but we turned to that page and realized it was ALL in Japanese with no pictures. This entire semester, our concept of English has gotten really funny. Most of the time that we speak to people in countries there is a lot of pantomime and using really simple words, so we have found that even on the ship when we talk to each other our English skills have gone wayyyyy downhill. One of my friends looked at the drink menu and said, “I wish this said things in English…like vodka. Or Corona” which was funny because neither of those words are English words. We finally tricked someone into speaking English with us and reading us the menu in English, so some of us ordered tequila sunrise and others ordered some drink with mango liqueur and ginger ale. Everything was good but we didn’t want to spend the whole night there so after about 2 drinks each we left. We got on the train and went to the Roppongi district because we had looked up some clubs there. We got out of the train station and there was a guy handing out flyers for something and we showed him the address of one of the clubs and he told us it was a salsa bar. We didn’t know it was a salsa bar and he seemed to speak perfect English so we talked to him for a minute in an attempt to find out about other bars or clubs in the area. He told us his name was Joe and that he was from South Africa. We told him we had been to South Africa recently so we talked about that for a minute and then we asked him how long he has been in Japan and he said, “11 years of course!” …of course? Why would that be “of course?” How are we supposed to know how long he has lived there? We let that weird comment slide and we asked him what he was doing in Japan and he said “working.” We asked him where he worked and he said “a titty bar” and proceeded to pull out a business card with pictures of topless women on it. Thanks, Joe, because I wasn’t sure exactly WHAT a titty bar was until you showed me that picture. We asked him if he knew of a good place for us to go BESIDES where he worked and he told us there was a club down the street called “club 911” (nine-one-one…not nine-eleven…just thought I should clear that up) and that it was “ladies night.” We thank Joe and go to club 911 and immediately realize we are about 20 years younger than anyone else in there. There are middle-aged men smoking cigars, middle-aged women drinking champagne, and a weird situation going on in the corner where a man in business attire is doing somewhat sexual dances in front of another man in business attire who is sitting on a couch. Everyone looked like they had just come from work and the place was all-around creepy. We left within 5 minutes. There was another club next door so we went in that and ended up seeing other people from Semester at Sea. It was more of a bar with a dance floor than a club but that was convenient because you could keep track of everyone you came with. We met people from “Norway” and “Orange County, California.” I don’t trust anything a person in a club says to me about themselves sooo they were probably from a random town in Wyoming and just happened to be in Japan. We couldn’t stay that long because we had to get the last train back to our hostel, so we left after about an hour and went to the train station. Apparently the last train didn’t run all the way to our stop and instead stopped two stops earlier. As a side note, trains in Japan obviously need to run later than 1am because the 12:50 train was the most crowded train I was on the entire time I was in Japan, so obviously everyone would like to be out later but can’t be. Anyway, we are two stops away from where we need to be so we talked to someone in the train station who said there was a bus leaving in a few minutes that would make a stop at our train station. We got on the bus, which was also very crowded, and it left about 10 minutes later. When it dropped us off at our train station, nothing looked familiar. Apparently the train station we had been using is pretty big and we had always come in a different entrance and then just walked through the inside. We walked around the whole building and didn’t recognize anything. We walked around for a good half hour really confused. Apparently you had to walk up some stairs and over a bridge to get to the area we recognized. Being lost late at night was pretty much the theme of Japan.


day 5:

-We took the train to Yokohama, where the ship was docked. We searched for a grocery store and ended up in a really fancy place that didn’t really have what we were looking for at all. While we were in the fancy mall-like place we figured we’d search for some souvenirs but they were nowhere to be found. I didn’t really buy much of anything in Japan besides food and a place to stay. We went back to the ship to drop our bags off and then went back into Yokohama for lunch. We wanted sushi one last time but a lot of places closed from 2-5, which is exactly when we were out. We found a sandwich place that was open so I ate another bangin sandwich. We stopped at a 7-11 and got snacks to hopefully hold us over until Hawaii. The food on the ship has gotten SO BAD! I thought it was bad in the beginning, but at least in the beginning it would have its good moments. Our standards of “good” got way lower than they would ever be at home, but sometimes we would be like “oh wow, dinner is pretty good today.” Yeah, that does NOT happen anymore. You can tell they’ve run out of anything remotely appetizing. So, we stocked up on snacks big time…which by the time I’m writing this it’s the day before Hawaii and I’m almost out of snacks.

Japan was so much fun. The country was beautiful and the people were unbelievably nice. I also traveled with a really good group of people. I can’t believe we all realized how much we like to travel together in one of the last countries. I really wish I had met these people sooner so that we could have done more stuff together. Even when things were stressful, we were all really good about saying what we felt about it, so it never really caused problems. It sucks to feel like the trip is almost over and I just now met the people I should have been traveling with all semester. I was worried because I really only knew two out of the four girls relatively well. Sarah invited Tara and Kaeleigh invited Alyte so there wasn’t any one of us that really KNEW the whole group. I was kind of worried about how it would go because in most of the countries Nicky and I have traveled together, and we have always traveled really well together and been on the same page with things, so there is never any question about whether it will be easy or hard or fun or not, because we know it will be easy and we know it will be fun, no matter what we end up doing. I wasn’t used to having to question whether I would get along with people, but it turned out sooo well.

I can’t believe that less than 20 days are left in the trip. I know that for about 3 days it will be nice to be home and see people and sleep in my own bed and eat real food. But, I know that after 2 or 3 days I will be more than ready to do another semester. Some people seem reallyyyyy excited to leave for good and I can’t say that I feel the same. There will be good things about it but I really don’t think that the good things about it can outweigh the good things I feel about this trip.

stocking up on non-nasty food after Japan:

all 5 of us in front of the Shinto shrine in Miyajima:

is it just me or does this girl look like she's holding deer poop and the deer looks like it's cursing at her in Japanese:

Alyte demonstrating the width of our "private room"...exactly the width of a person

me feeding the ducks with the hippie's chips in the park in Kyoto

all 5 of us in front of a cherry blossom in the park in Kyoto:

some geishas at the geisha show:

China: They Played the Numa Numa Song at the Great Wall AND During My $6 Haircut

Day 1:

We docked in Hong Kong. Nicky and I decided not to go on the city orientation we had signed up for because the one in Vietnam wasn’t all that great. The place the ship docked was really weird – you had to walk through a mall to get to and from the ship. We went with Tara and walked through the mall and searched for an atm. We saw a Starbucks and I had to succumb to getting some because I haven’t had any all semester and it sounded really good at the time. We went to a “ladies market” which is really just an outdoor market and isn’t actually for ladies in particular. We walked around for a little while; a lot of places sold really random stuff. Tara wanted to stay because she had a lot of gifts to buy for family and friends but she told Nicky and I that she felt fine staying alone. We walked around the area for a little while and then went back to the ship area. We took a ferry to Hong Kong Island, which is where most of the skyline and important areas of Hong Kong are anyway. The ship had docked on another island that is a part of Hong Kong called Kowloon, but I’m probably spelling that wrong. We found the “longest escalator in the world,” which is really a set of lots of little escalators. You go up an escalator for awhile and then you walk a few feet to get to the next one. Sometimes they are escalators and other times they are moving sidewalks uphill. Apparently in the mornings they go down so people can get to work, but for most of the day they go up. It was convenient for getting to other places of the city. We got off in an area that looked really Chinese, and by that I mean that we were the only white people there. We went into a restaurant because we wanted to eat something really authentic. They handed us an English menu that I’m pretty sure had much higher prices than the Chinese menu did because it seemed like we paid a little too much for our food but whatever. I open the menu and the first page is titled “Assorted Snakes Banquet.” I laughed hysterically and pointed it out to Nicky, who decided to order a snake soup. I ordered lemon duck. The food was good; Nicky’s snake soup was better than I expected but not amazing. My lemon duck was really good but almost too sweet. The tea tasted like dirty water. I really don’t like green tea at all but I found myself drinking kind of a lot of it in China because I was always cold. We left the restaurant and walked around for awhile. There were some small shops and stuff lining the streets. One had all this paper and wooden Chinese trinkets and stuff and we picked up one thing that we didn’t know what it was and a guy saw us looking at it and told us it was a tissue box cover but he pronounced it “teeee-shoe box” which for some reason really made me laugh. After we walked around for a little while, we continued up the escalator. We took it to the top and then decided to walk down so we could see things that we missed. We came across some botanical gardens that were combined with some “zoological gardens” so we walked around there for awhile. Nicky used the bathroom there and came out and told me that the urinal was like a giant waterfall that you just peed into so I made him go back in and take a picture for me. I had to see it and it was either that or go into the men’s room. We kept walking and we got really confused as to where we were. We were walking on paths that were clearly designed for pedestrians but we were walking through places that it didn’t feel like you should be walking through, like under overpasses for cars. We had no idea where we were going, we just figured if we kept walking downhill we would eventually get to a place we either recognized or could at least find a taxi. We came across “Hong Kong Park” so we walked around there for awhile. We saw the “tea ware” museum, which was supposed to be a stop on our city orientation. It was free so we went in and it was the most ridiculous museum I have ever seen and I was so glad I didn’t go on the city orientation. It was empty rooms with some teapots and other tea things in it. On the way out there was a stand where old people wrote our names in Chinese. Nicky, who since college has decided he is too cool for that name, told them to write Mike and I, obviously, told them to write Sarah. They pronounced our names “Miiiikeyyy and Saaawwwaahhhh” Later in the trip, we learned that Chinese people translate names to Chinese characters by the way they sound so it made sense later why they kept sounding our names out really awkwardly. After Hong Kong park, we took the ferry back to the ship and met Megan, Jordan, Nikki, and Tom for dinner. We took the ferry back over and took the peak tram up to Victoria Peak which has really good views of the city. There was supposed to be a “light show” throughout the skyline but it was a lame excuse for a light show. We came back down on the peak tram and tried to get the taxi drivers to take us back to the escalator but they wouldn’t. We assumed they wouldn’t because it was such a short distance, but taxi drivers in China charge a flat rate to begin with and then the price goes up really slowly as you keep driving. So, he would have gotten the flat rate, which was less than $2 USD, regardless, so that was weird. We walked around until we found the escalator and took it up until we found an Italian restaurant called Fat Angelo’s that Nicky and I had seen earlier. After an afternoon of snake soup and with the knowledge that we were going on a semester at sea trip and would probably be eating mainly Chinese for the next few days, we were okay eating something like Italian. Dinner was really good even though the waiter was kind of confused by a lot of things. After dinner we came back to the ship and I packed for my trip the next day.

Day 2:

We left the ship around 10:00 for our flight to Beijing. Immigration at the airport was pretty intense, especially since flying to/from Hong Kong to other parts of China is considered an international flight, which is really weird. The process at the airport took much longer than in any other country we’ve been to, including the US. The flight to Beijing was about 3 hours but it didn’t feel too long. They served us a meal that was actually pretty good and we got mini containers of haagen daaz ice cream. Flying anywhere in the USA after this trip is going to be really annoying because I think we are the only country that doesn’t give you something to eat and drink for free. We got to Beijing and buses took us to dinner. Every meal we had in China consisted of a ton of food being put on a rotating disc in the middle of the table and everyone taking what they wanted. Dinner was sooo good. One of the things they served was peking duck which I really liked. You were supposed to wrap it in a rice paper tortilla-esque thing and put this really good sauce on it. It was times like that when the communal eating style was kind of annoying because I wanted to eat all of it myself. Sometimes it was kind of hard to tell what things were and Megan tried to ask them what something was and they told her it was pork. She pointed to something different and the guy said “sheep” and then started laughing hysterically with his friends. The way he was laughing made me assume he was kidding and giving us a hard time but it was China so you never really know. As we were trying to use chopsticks, a girl dropped a piece of chicken in her drink. We all laughed, but little did we know that at literally EVERY meal that we ate after that on the trip, SOMEONE would drop a piece of food in a drink. Megan referred to it as a microcosm for all the little problems we ran into in China that were ultimately meaningless and pretty funny. I managed to never drop food in my drink, but one time I asked Nicky to grab something for me and he dropped it in my drink so I still was unable to drink for half of one meal. After dinner, we got to the hotel. It wasn’t anywhere near as nice as other hotels semester at sea has put us in, but even though the nice hotels are really cool, we never spend any time in them and in the back of my mind I always think about how they are kind of unnecessary, so I was fine with where we were staying in Beijing. Some of us wanted to go out and walk around and get some kind of dessert, maybe a pastry, and a cup of coffee. 8 of us went out to do that, not realizing how many problems we were going to run into. In Hong Kong, a lot of people spoke some English. We knew that it would be easier in Hong Kong because it used to be a British area, but we thought that other parts of China wouldn’t be THAT bad, because we knew that a lot of people learned English in school. I guess what we should have realized was that only educated Chinese people would really know any English. We walked around for awhile and realized our hotel wasn’t really in downtown Beijing and was kind of in the middle of nowhere. We found one pastry shop but it didn’t have a place to sit down so we kept walking. 3 people were standing outside one restaurant and they were dressed funny so we stopped to look at them and before we knew it we were being ushered into the building and up the stairs to the restaurant. We decided to look at the menu to see if they had any dessert and coffee since that’s what we wanted, but they only had really weird shit. Some people tried to order the most dessert-like things we could find on the menu, but they were things like “sesame cakes” and “refried bean rolls” (that actually tasted nothing like beans at all). The people in the restaurant spoke NO english and it took us a good 5 minutes to even get a menu. After people had ordered, she came out and said something along the lines of “2 sesame rolls?” and the two people who had ordered it pointed to themselves. Based on the picture on the menu, there were supposed to be 4 rolls per order, but she told us “we only have 5” as she held up 4 fingers. The rest of the time was pretty much like that. Megan and I left early to try to go back to that pastry shop, but we got there at 9:10 and it had closed at 9 so that was depressing. We really wanted coffee still so we tried to ask people on the street. We would go up to people and ask them if they spoke English and some legitimately didn’t but others just didn’t want to help us. One person responded, in perfect English, with “no, I don’t speak English.” Finally Megan went into a barber shop and asked about coffee and they recognized the word and we found the kind of place we were looking for. We squeezed 8 people in a booth that was probably meant for 6 and got irish coffee. The menu at this place was hilarious. In Thailand, we noticed that they spelled a lot of English words wrong or would use the wrong words sometimes in translations, but NOTHING compares to the signs and menus in China. One item on the menu was called “strawberry acid milk with.” First of all, what is acid milk?! Second of all, with what??? This was just a menu full of mysteries. After that we went back to the hotel and went to bed. Before bed, I took a shower and ran into a small problem. We didn’t really have a bathtub OR a shower stall, we just kind of had a shower area. It had a curtain but halfway through my shower I realized the curtain didn’t reach all the way to the bottom and water leaked halfway across the floor while I was showering. My main goal was to keep it from reaching my dry pajamas on the ground, which it didn’t, so beyond that I didn’t really care.

Day 3:

We left for the Great Wall around 7:00am. As soon as we got there, we realized it should be renamed the great STAIRCASE of China. It was a lot more work than I expected. I knew what it looked like and that some climbing would be involved to get to a high enough point for good views, but I guess I just expected ramps and not stairs. I was afraid my body would have a repeat of table mountain but luckily the crazy Chinese and their rice for breakfast served me and my carbohydrate needs well. We climbed for awhile until we got to a good place to see things well. It was really cool to be there but it wasn’t really the views I was expecting. Apparently there are 2 popular places to go, but the one we went to is a little closer to Beijing so that’s where most people go. Personally I would have been fine driving longer to get the better views but whatever. We spent a couple of hours at the wall and then went to lunch. Lunch was REALLY good and after we ate we went to a shopping area that it was attached to. After lunch, we went to the Summer Palace. The Chinese girl who had been riding the bus with us and taking us places (she wasn’t technically a guide so I don’t know what to call her) walked us around for awhile. We walked through the palace area, which was in a really pretty place on a lake and stuff like that. Then, we walked through some of the “longest painted corridor in the world.” We got about halfway through and the woman told us that there were 2 ways to get back to the bus. She said we could walk through the 2^nd half of the corridor or we could pay $10 chinese dollars (less than 2 USD) to go up some stairs into a temple and then walk back down the stairs and we would be led right to the bus. We didn’t have much time left, and we didn’t want to climb TOO many stairs after the great staircase of China, but we wanted to see the temple so we asked her how long it was. She said it was a really short staircase with only 100 stairs. She said that the Chinese have a saying “if you climb 100 stairs you will live 100 years.” For some reason saying it like that made it sound a lot more appealing so we decided to do it. 100 stairs was a LIE. It was a lot more stairs than that and by the time we got up there we had to rush around, which sucked because it was a lot prettier than in the beginning. After the temple, we had to go down a long path to get to the bus and there were really pretty bridges over water and stuff like that. We wished we had more time there and had spent less time on our tour at the beginning. After the summer palace, we went to Tsinghua University. Students met us there to give us a tour of the campus. There was one Chinese student for about 6 of us. Our students’ name was Tara so we walked around for awhile while she gave us the campus tour. We asked her a lot of questions and she asked us a lot too. While we passed some athletic fields, she asked us what our favorite sports to play are and we told her; she said hers is badminton, which for some reason I thought was funny. Apparently that’s a pretty popular sport in China because after her, I heard several more people talk about it. After the tour, we went to one of the campus dining halls and ate dinner with Tara and got to talk to her some more. She told us some really interesting things about China. She said that going to college in China is based entirely on test scores. The test is way more intense and comprehensive than our SAT. It covers more subjects, including English. Every Chinese person that goes past elementary school has to learn English. I think she said they usually start learning when they are 13. You take the test and you are offered admission to some schools and not others based on your score. We asked her what she thinks about China’s one child policy and she said that it is hard but effective. She said China is so big that something needed to be done. She explained that since she is an only child and will most likely marry an only child, she will be allowed to have 2 children. We asked her if she wants girls, boys, or both and she said “oh girls of course! They are easier to teach!” We thought that was a funny comment because so many people in China would prefer to have a boy. Some things we tried to ask her were kind of hard to communicate but it made it funny. Megan got an ice cream bar from the dining hall and it tasted exactly like a buttered popcorn jelly belly. She asked Tara, “What flavor is this?” Tara didn’t understand the question at all. She took the wrapper and looked really confused and said, “ice cream taste?” and then proceeded to read us the ingredients from the wrapper. After the university visit, we went back to the hotel. The night before, Megan and I had seen a Sweeny Todd-esque barber shop (not the same one Megan asked about coffee) and commented on how we kind of both needed haircuts. It was decorated in all blacks and reds and had huge gold mirrors. All the hairdressers had kind of crazy hair and they played loud music. It looked like an all around fun place and based on how much our other experiences in China had made us laugh so far, we thought it would be funny to try to get one there. We went there and managed to get the point across as to what we wanted. Megan wanted her hair trimmed straight across but I needed my layers trimmed. It seemed like they understood so they took us over to wash our hair. They massaged my head way better than they would in the USA. I kind of hoped Megan and I would get to sit next to each other while we got our hair cut, but we didn’t. The guy cutting my hair was really flamboyant and even though he spoke NO English, he made me laugh. He started cutting my hair and it seemed like he was doing it the same way they would in the USA. One woman that worked there but wasn’t cutting either of our hair spoke a little bit of English. She came up behind me and I saw her eyes widen in the mirror. She started yelling at him and he started arguing back with her. 3 people were behind my hair all of the sudden. I got really scared that he was doing something crazy back there. The woman who spoke some English left for a minute and went to talk to Megan. She came back to me and said, “ummm you want your hair cut in a line?” I was kind of confused and I said, “well uhhh kind of but a lot of lines and I separated some of my layers to show her that I needed it trimmed in different places.” She said “OH, different from she?” and pointed to Megan. I realized that she thought I wanted my hair cut the same way Megan did, which I didn’t. I was like oh yeah, different! And she looked relieved and laughed and left. It was funny because the guy cutting my hair didn’t speak any English, but the gestures he did after that happened were so clear. He started kicking her away and saying things and making movements like he wanted to tell me, “psshhh don’t listen to her! I know what I’m doing!” It was really funny. The haircut cost the equivalent of $6.50 USD. When I go home, I’m not going to want to pay for ANYTHING at our prices! After our haircuts, the woman who spoke some English wanted to learn some English from us. She drew pictures of different haircuts (straight across, layers, tapered ends, etc) and wanted us to write down the English words for her. As we were about to leave, she wanted to take a picture with us. As we were taking the picture, other random people that hadn’t even dealt with us while we were there wanted to get in the picture. It’s true; Chinese people just love pictures. After the haircut, 7 of us wanted to go to the water cube (Olympic swimming stadium) because it’s supposedly lit up at night. Apparently I’m not meant to see ANYTHING lit up at night, because just like the Torre Acbar in Spain, it was NOT lit up. Since there were 7 of us, we took two taxis. The other group paid their taxi when they got there but then just had him take them back to the hotel. When our taxi printed us our receipt, which was $13 chinese dollars, we handed him exact change. He got really angry and kept motioning toward the money. We had no idea what he wanted because we gave him exact change. We thought maybe he wanted a tip, which isn’t customary in China but sometimes they expect it from Americans because they know we usually do it. We tried to give him another dollar and he got even more angry. He started doing the Chinese equivalent of cursing us out. We were SO confused and someone tried to take out a 20, which is only about $3 USD and figured we could just give him the 20 and we could take the 13 back and maybe he would start yelling. He wouldn’t even take the 20 and gestured at us to get out so we got out as quickly as possible and found a new taxi back to the hotel. Megan and I hung out in Nicky and Derek’s room for a little while that night, but we went to bed relatively early that night because we were exhausted.

Day 4:

We went to Tiananmen Square and the forbidden city aka imperial palace in the morning. It was a little frustrating that we weren’t really given any information on the places we were going because I didn’t really know anything about the massacres that occurred there. Sometimes the tours people give us are a little bit overdoing it and I feel like I get TOO much information. But, in China we didn’t really get anything. Apparently in 1989, a lot of students protested in the area in favor of democracy and against some of the communist ideals enforced under Mao’s government and eventually there was a huge massacre. According to Nicky, we learned about this in 11^th grade in world history, but history goes in one ear and out the other to me. I’ve been better about learning history on

this trip because I can actually SEE what I’m learning about, but in high school I absorbed pretty much nothing. We didn’t hear anything about any of that, but I guess even if we had had professional tour guides we still wouldn’t have heard about it. Someone in one of my classes said they had a tour guide and they tried to ask about it and they said, “oh no no, we can’t talk about that here!” Later on their bus, the guide tried to explain why the right thing had been done in the situation and stuff along those lines – basically a bunch of brainwash. One of my teachers said there had been a documentary on our tv here (I’m soo glad semester at sea informed us..) about the massacre and one analyst referred to brainwash-like situations like that as “the pact with the devil” in that when the Chinese wanted to have more of a capitalistic-type economy, they were given malls and stuff like that but most of their freedom of expression and what we would call “first amendment rights” were taken away. After walking through the square, we walked through the forbidden city. It was really cool for a little while but it all looked kind of the same to me. I could have handled spending much less time there. While we were at the forbidden city, me, Nicky, and Megan were looking at an interactive map, which is actually a really cool invention that American tourist spots should adopt. It showed you where you were and you could press various things, like bathrooms, food, etc and it would light up on the map. You could scroll through the screen and see zoomed in and zoomed out views of the whole layout. As we were looking at the map, a Chinese person tapped me on the shoulder and said, “I will take photo with you?” I noticed in China that when people know English, they don’t use words that we would use to imply permission. We would say “can I” or “will you” or “may I” or something along those lines. When we drew pictures and translations for the woman in the barber, she said, “you will give this to me?” Anyway, this man asked me “I will take photo with you?” I laughed and said yes and on the way to take the picture, he touched my hair a little bit. Anywhere else that would have been pretty creepy but I think they were just fascinated by anyone who didn’t have dark brown hair, and since Megan and Nicky both do, they were drawn to me first. I took a couple awkward pictures with two people, but after awhile they wanted Megan and Nicky to join in too, and then more Chinese people joined in, and it was just a really funny random situation. One or two of the guys spoke some English, and he told Megan and I that we were very beautiful. If I could get guys in my own country to start treating me like that, that would be nice. After the Forbidden City, we went to the Temple of Heaven. I felt similarly about it as I did with the Forbidden City; it was cool at first but it all kind of looked the same. We were standing in front of one of the temples and Megan said to me, “This looks just like the other one…but with 3 levels instead of 2…but they pretty much look exactly the same.” We had been so used to no one speaking English that I guess we had started to say whatever we would normally say and didn’t really care who heard us. An asian guy in front of us turns around and, in perfect English, says “That is a VERY accurate description!” It startled us at first but we had a pretty funny conversation with him after. He was from the USA and was only visiting and pretty much felt the same way we did about all of these famous sites. We’re lucky he didn’t turn around and say something like, “That is so disrespectful of you!” After the Temple of Heaven, we went to an acrobat show. It was a lot like cirque de soilei, but it was even cooler because we didn’t know what to expect. When I saw cirque de soilei in the USA, I loved it but I had high expectations. We had no idea what to expect from this so when it was that entertaining, it exceeded whatever we thought it would be. The beginning was pretty weird – they had birds fly over the audience and other weird things. But, after awhile they just did really cool tricks and stuff and pretty much made me feel like my body is completely useless. After the show we went to an indoor market. We had to get our own dinner that night but the only things around were McDonalds, Subway, and fast-food-like Chinese. We had been eating such good Chinese food that we weren’t really in the mood for the fast food version. We ended up eating McDonalds, even though that isn’t what we wanted either. They had some deal going on where you got a spicy chicken sandwich, fries, a drink, and their version of apple pie for a good price. Nicky ordered first and was given a “red bean pie.” Not as weird as Thailand’s tuna pie, but still pretty gross. Megan and I made sure we didn’t get that and we got a pineapple pie. Also kind of weird, but at least it was sweet tasting. We went back to the hotel and it felt weird to be back by 9:30 on our last night in Beijing. Nicky and I still wanted to do stuff but everyone else kind of felt like just hanging out at the hotel. We didn’t really have anything in mind to do, so we took a taxi to a street that Tara said was right by her school and had a lot to do on it. When we got there, it seemed like a lot of the shops and things there would normally be to do were closed. We walked around and found a “u-center” which we assumed stood for university center and we went into a “Charlie Brown Café.” It was a cute place, obviously Charlie Brown themed, but we were the only white people in there (besides some British people that were asking directions) so, strangely it didn’t feel like a tourist spot. We split a coffee and a piece of cake and went back to the hotel around 11:30.

Day 5:

We got up, checked out of the hotel, and went to the Beijing zoo to see the giant pandas. The zoo was pretty gross. The pandas were really cute though, but they weren’t as “giant” as I imagined. The zoo was just all-around depressing and the pandas looked really sad. One was actually pulling on the bars trying to escape. After the zoo, we went to the bird’s nest (Olympic stadium) and water cube. The birds’ nest just made you want to participate in physical movement. You could tell someone had gone out of their way to create an inspirational soundtrack to play. The songs were in other languages but I guess inspirational songs just have a certain sound to them. We had wheelbarrow races, built human pyramids, and other funny stuff. Nicky and I tried to do something that he apparently used to be able to do when he did karate where you hold onto each other’s ankles and somersault overtop of each other. It was NOT pretty, or successful, but it was pretty funny. We spent about an hour and a half in the birds nest and then some people wanted to see the water cube. You had to pay an extra $5 USD to see the water cube, and we only had about a half hour left so we couldn’t really hang out in there like we did with the bird’s nest. I didn’t really want to pay for it or rush around, and neither did Nicky and Katie so we just kind of hung out while everyone else went. After the Olympic stuff we went to another indoor market while we were killing time before the airport. Our guide told us that behind the market was a pretty nice mall and if we weren’t in the mood for shopping we could go to the Apple store or go out to eat or something like that. Me, Nicky, and Megan were really craving pizza so we found a pizza restaurant and ate there. People behind us were speaking English and we didn’t recognize any of them from Semester at Sea so we asked them what they were doing in China. Two of them were there for a year to teach English and one was visiting her sister. We talked to them for awhile about their program. The program they went through didn’t really seem like that great of a program, but the idea of spending a year there sounds really cool. If I could find a better program to go through, I would definitely do something like that. We left for the airport and flew to Shanghai where we got driven in a bus to the ship. It was weird to see the ship in a port that we hadn’t actually been there to see it dock in.

Day 6:

On the last day in Shanghai, me, Nicky, and Megan had signed up for a Semester at Sea trip called “Tasting the Daily Life of a Shanghai Citizen.” First, we went to a community center. It was kind of hard to communicate sometimes because they had a translator, but from what I could tell the center is free to those who want to use it. They have a lot of activities for adults there; we saw ballroom-like dancing and a choir. The people we observed seemed like they must go there a lot, because the singers were really good singers and the dancers were doing organized dances. Some of them pulled us in to dance with them and tried to teach us the steps. It wasn’t really ballroom dancing because it was a lot faster, but it had just as intricate of movements. I got the impression that the place was more for retired adults, but their retiring age in China is around 55. A lot of the people there seemed between the ages of my parents and grandparents, so they made especially funny dance partners. It was kind of hard to dance with them because they couldn’t really tell us what to do, but it was really funny. When we saw the choir, they sang some songs for us and then they wanted us to sing for them. All anyone could think of to sing was “you are my sunshine.” After the community center, we visited a kindergarten. The kids were really cute and told us their names in English and then sang some English songs, like “head shoulders knees and toes.” In one room, the kids seemed a little bit older, and some of them volunteered to do stuff by themselves. One boy sang a song and then said he was going to do a kung fu show but got too nervous. Another girl sang a song and halfway through you could tell she forgot the words. Her classmates started laughing at her, and she turned around and shook her pointer finger at them and yelled at them in Chinese. It was something I noticed A LOT of in China – even though people didn’t speak English, their mannerisms were so similar to ours that you could pretty much tell exactly what they were saying. This girl was saying something along the lines of, “shut up and leave me alone! YOU’RE not up here doing this! Just give me a minute!” We went to an acupuncture clinic and one girl volunteered to have acupuncture done on her hand, but it was hard to judge whether or not it was effective because she didn’t really have any ailments to complain about. I want to try acupuncture some day, but it cost about $3 USD to try it there and I didn’t want to pay to have one or two needles stuck into my hand and not really accomplish anything. One boy also tried “cupping” which is this weird thing where they heat cups with a flame and they suction to your skin and they’re supposed to suck toxins out or something along those lines and they leave really strange cup-shaped welts on your skin. The welts supposedly don’t hurt but it’s just a weird practice. Someone in one of my classes said he has done it in the USA for his allergies and that it actually helped a lot. After the clinic we stopped at a local market and all got snacks, despite the guides warnings that we shouldn’t eat because we were about to eat lunch. We assured him we would be fine and would still be able to eat. We were NOT fine. We went to a local woman’s house and she cooked us a huge meal. Except for maybe one of the meals in Beijing, it was the best meal I had the whole time, and it was SO MUCH FOOD. We all ate a lot but we couldn’t come close to finishing it. Even if we hadn’t gotten a snack at the market, we never could have finished this food. She kept trying to urge us (in Chinese) to eat more. We were eating off of one of those communal rotating discs, which I thought was interesting that they even have them in their own houses and not just at restaurants. At the end of the meal, we were all talking and some people were casually picking at food. I picked a few melon slices up with my chopsticks and ate them as we were talking. She was watching me do it and she picked up the bowl off of the disc and put it in front of me, like she wanted me to finish all of it. It was all slightly awkward because they made you feel kind of guilty for not eating, but it was a ridiculous amount of food. During lunch, I talked to a Semester at Sea employee for awhile about how she spent a year in China teaching English. She went through a different program than the people we ran into in the pizza place. Her program sounded a lot better and I really want to talk to her about it more before the semester is over. On the way back, we got the bus to drop us off on a popular street. We got a 30 minute foot massage for about $5USD. One girl that got dropped off with us from the SAS trip came with us and she got pretty intense with the massage people. Her masseuse kept checking her phone or having a conversation with someone else in the place, she started last and ended first, and she definitely got the worst massage out of all of us. She refused to pay the full amount of money, and it got a little awkward but it was really funny.

A few pictures...I wanted to post the video Megan took of me dancing with an old man but it would have used too much internet time:



The most confusing sign we saw at the Great Wall...what does this even mean?


Katie, Megan, Erika, me, Brian, Derek, and Nicky making a human pyramid at the bird's nest


me, Megan, and Nicky with the random Chinese people at the Forbidden City


Nicky, Megan, Jordan, me, Nikki, and Tom on top of Victoria Peak with Hong Kong in the background:


trying to somersault:
Nicky, Derek, me, Megan, Erika, and Katie on the Great Wall:


all of us with Tara doing a classic Chinese picture:

us all at the coffee shop that we FINALLY found on the first night in Beijing:

Megan and I doing a Chinese picture on the Great Wall:

Nicky and I getting double-Chinese on the Great Wall:

damn those speaking cell phones..