Sarah's Semester at Sea: 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: