I traveled with two of my close friends around Japan with no
plan. We hopped off the ship, grabbed a train and off to Tokyo we went. We
ended up in Shibuya, it was absolutely incredible. The streets were like nothing I have ever
seen before. It was like Time Square on drugs.
The signs were flashier and brighter. It was night time, but looked like
daytime with all the flashing lights. There was also music playing blasting out of
almost every store. Instead of the
streets being filled with cars, they were filled with thousands of Japanese
kids our age. It looked like a massive party out on the streets. After walking
around for a while we stopped in to a restaurant. When you
walked in there was a vending machine looking thing in the corner and what we
had to do was insert money and chose our dinner. It was harder than it sounds because
everything was written in Japanese. So the three of us chose meals and out came
a ticket that we then had to hand to the chef behind the counter. When we got
our meals we actually had a slurping contest with a local sitting next to us (he didn't know it was a contest).
It is good adequate to slurp your food, symbolizing that it tastes very good.
Later we decide to do what the locals do and we went to karaoke. It is huge in
japan! It was definitely not what I was expecting. They give your group your
own small room, when a song starts the lights turn off and the walls become a crazy mural under the black light . Since we were Americans they were excited to give us a massive book
filled with American songs. We spent an hour there and it was a blast! After
singing our hearts out, we ran into a guy named Ray and his girlfriend chi. He
was born in California but has been living in Japan for three years now. He
showed us places that the locals loved and bought us dessert, which was super
friendly. As the three of us were walking back to our hotel it started to snow!
It was the perfect ending to our night.
The hotels
in Japan are also very different. Each person gets their own bed and slippers
for your room. Not to mention that the beds came up to about your shins, very
low to the ground. The day was amazing but then disaster struck. I got food
poisoning. I was up from 5 to 8 losing my weight out of my mouth. It was awful
but I did not let it slow me down. We went to the store in the morning got some crackers and
were on our way. We ended up seeing Ray again and he was nice enough to walk us
to the train station. On our way we actually ran into one of his friends. They decided to take us to lunch and it was amazing! The place was super
high tech. It was a sushi place that when you sat down each person had an
electronic menu and when you ordered, the sushi came out from the sliding wall
in front of you and stopped at your seat. You then had to press an angry looking face
and that sent the tray back to the kitchen. Even though I was sick there was no way I was going to
miss out so I ordered some Sushi and loved every bite. During that
meal I would eat, throw it up, then order a little more. It was just too cool
and too good not to keep trying the different kind of sushi they had. After lunch we got on another train, said goodbye to our
new friends and was off to our next destination, Itabashi, the suburbs of Tokyo.
No one spoke English there and almost everyone was on bikes. Attempting to talk with locals was a riot. It is like a massive Pictionary game trying to
guess what their hand movements meant.
Japan is
incredible and at this point I can not get enough.
No comments:
Post a Comment