We luckily got on a train that
went straight to Shibuya without even knowing it (Shibuya is a section of
Tokyo). Surprisingly, Tokyo is a lot
bigger than I expected. We went and saw
Shibuya crossing which is supposedly the biggest, busiest crossing in the world
with about 3.2 million people crossing every day. When we went, it wasn’t nearly as busy as I
think it usually is. I’m not sure why
that was the case, but it was still pretty busy. After walking around a little bit we got back
on the train and went towards Tokyo tower.
After some confusion on how to get to the tower by
train, we finally made it to our stop.
The tower was only a short walk from the train station, but we could see
the tower so there was no need for a map.
The tower looked like a red version of the Eiffel Tower. On the way to the tower we passed some
temples and shrines that were really pretty.
I actually found the temples to be cooler looking than the tower. We didn’t go up in the tower even though
after I got back on the ship I heard it was an awesome view. We were planning to go to the Imperial
Palace, but ended up just going back to Yokohama for dinner.
We went to a conveyer belt sushi restaurant which was
awesome! The only problem was I didn’t
really know what I was grabbing off the conveyer belt. There was a menu that had most of the sushi
that was going around, but by the time I figured out what the dish was it was
way past where I was sitting. Most of
the stuff I pulled off was delicious like the salmon things, the tuna rolls,
and whatever else I got, but there was one dish that I took that still makes me
gag just thinking about it. It was some
sort of shrimp and rice roll with fish eggs on top. I’ve had rolls similar to this before, so I
thought this wouldn’t be bad. Boy was I
wrong. I can’t even describe the taste,
but as soon as it hit my tongue I wanted to spit it out and scrape my tongue of
the sick, nasty taste that overwhelmed my taste buds. After dinner, we went next door to “Hawaiian
Town”… yes there was a Hawaiian town in Japan… to get these donut-like things
for dessert, which were delicious if you were wondering.
We then tried to make our way to wherever the bullet
train (which is better known, actually only known, as the shinkansen in Japan)
picked up. When we finally got to the
station that the shinkansen went through, we had no clue where to go to get to
it. We probably looked like lost,
helpless puppy dogs because we were approached by a young Japanese woman who
asked if we needed help. We told her we
were trying to find the bullet train, and of course she was confused because
they don’t call it by that name. After
we all got on the same page, she didn’t just tell us how to get to the station,
but she took us down, up, through, and around the station to where we buy
tickets for the train. On top of that,
she then stayed with us to help us buy the correct tickets and translate what
the ticket guy was saying. It was one of
the kindest things I have ever seen anyone do for lost foreigners, but
apparently cases like this happen more frequently than you’d expect in
Japan. The people there are incredibly
kind! We got on the shinkansen and
settled in for about a three hour ride to Kobe.
The shinkansen was a pretty nice train, but the section we were in had a
lot of people, which led to an interesting aroma. It wasn’t necessarily a smell that wasn’t
manageable to be around, but it definitely wasn’t a pleasant smell. While on the train, I was extremely hungry
and there was a food cart that came around but I didn’t know what anything was
so I didn’t chance it. The best part was
I felt like I was on the Asian version of the Hogwarts Express; I mean it
wasn’t nearly as cool as the Hogwarts train, but something about it reminded me
of that.
In Yokohama and Tokyo, there were a fair number of
English speakers, but that percentage decreased as we got into
Kobe. It seemed like there wasn’t nearly
as much English around which didn’t help with our poor navigation with the
train system. Once we got into the Kobe
area, we had to take another train to get to the hotel. We, again, had difficulties figuring out
which train to get on and what stop we were supposed to get off to get close to
the hotel. We asked many different
people and received different answers from almost every person. We got on a train, got off at the wrong stop,
got on another train, and almost got off at the wrong stop again before we got
to the right stop. Then, on top of
everything else, we had no clue where the hotel was and couldn’t find anyone
who knew where the hotel was or could understand what we were asking. After a good amount of struggle, we finally
found it about two or three blocks away from the train station.
Kyle and Sawyer already had a reservation at this
hotel, so Jillian and I thought we’d just ask if they had any open rooms that
we could use. The man at the front desk
didn’t know much English, so communicating was kind of difficult. He had an open room, so Jillian and I felt a
load of relief that we didn’t have to go out and search for a place to
stay. We went up the elevator to the
ninth floor. The doors opened and we get
bombarded with a gust of nasty, smoky air.
We walked to the end of the hall to our room which was just as bad. We went back down to the front desk to ask
for a non-smoking room, but unfortunately they said they were all booked. That was one thing that I didn’t even think
about since it doesn’t happen back home anymore, but smoking in public
facilities is still legal in Japan. Even
restaurants allowed smoking; most had smoking “sections” but, no matter what, the
smoke filled the air. We went back to
the room and started to settle in a bit.
There was a big king size bed that was much lower to the ground than I’m
used to. Then we looked inside of the
bathroom door (which looked eerily like the bathroom in our rooms on the
ship). It was extremely small with a
toilet that had a remote-like attachment with a bunch of buttons with pictures
(some pictures I couldn’t even guess what they were depicting and others were
not something I wanted to be done to me) and a shower that had the tallest tub
that I’ve ever seen (it probably came up to my hip, which might not be saying
too much seeing that I’m such a shorty but it was much taller than what I
consider to be usual). Then, when we went
to bed, I was so exhausted and the bed looked so inviting and the pillow looked
so fluffy that I just belly flopped onto the bed which ended up being a
terrible idea. The pillow was like the
killer bunny from Monty Python and the
Holy Grail; even though it looked inviting with all of its fluffiness, the
inside was like a sack of rocks (I think it was actually a sack of beans, but
either way it was not pleasant). It’s a
good thing I can pretty much sleep no matter what the conditions are and that I
was exhausted, otherwise it would have been a rough night.
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