Rain, rain go away...

When I left dreary Toronto, I was looking forward to blue skies and sunny weather. Too bad we decided to visit Japan in rainy season. It has been overcast since we landed and rained for a good portion of that time as well which sucks because we were walking outside in Harajuku yesterday.

We first went to a family type restaurant called Shakey's where they had all you can eat pizza. They even had dessert pizza! I had one with bananas with chocolate sauce on it which may sound a bit gross but was amazing nonetheless. Once we were stuffed, we decided to walk along the famous streets of Harajuku. Unfortunately it was pouring so we took refuge in a big Gap store. After more walking, we headed over to Meiji temple.


Misty path leading to Meiji temple

It was very beautiful but at this time Althea and I were really uncomfortable because we were wet, sleep deprived and kind of nauseous from all the food we ate at lunch so we decided to head home to change and take a well needed nap and decide on dinner later. Alas the pizza at Shakey's turned out to be our breakfast, lunch and dinner because we fell asleep at Kyle's place and didn't wake up the next morning.

First Night

After 22 hours of eating plane food and our gross breakfast at Chili's (so gross in fact that I needed some Imodium afterwards), Lydia and I were hungry for some real food, so the both of us, along with Kyle and his friend Will, headed over to Kokubunji and had some tempura and rice bowls. I must say, they were really, really tasty.




One of the things I like about eating out in Japan is the lack of tipping. In fact, from what I've read it's actually offensive to tip your waiter. I much prefer that to the North American custom where you're expected to leave a generous tip for even the crapiest of service.

Anyway, after dinner Lydia and I decided that 48 hours without a good night's sleep simply wasn't enough and that we would attempt to push the limits of our sleep deprived and jet lagged bodies even further. So instead of sleeping, the four of us all headed out to take part in one of Japan's greatest cultural experiences ever invented: Karaoke.

When Will and Kyle had first suggested karaoke, I was expecting a large bar with a stage, and drunk people on top of it singing to even more drunk people in the audience. Kyle said that he hadn't seen anything like that here which leads me to believe that that setup is actually an Americanized version of karaoke. Instead, the karaoke bar we went to was actually very similar to the one that I've been to in Markham. We got our own small private room with couches, a TV, a karaoke machine, and unlimited access to free coffee and tea (a privilege that we completely abused) and we were left to ourselves to sing our little hearts out.

The evening ended up becoming the most intense session of karaoke I've ever been a part of. In fact, I wouldn't even call it a session, it was a marathon. We were there from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. the next morning--that's 6 hours of singing--and surprisingly, even when our time was up, we left wanting more. Our final song was an energetic cover of everyone's favourite 1980s song, Ghostbusters.

When we finally exited the karaoke bar it was daylight outside and we stumbled back to Kyle's house to get some much needed sleep. Unfortunately, all the caffeine I had drank earlier turned out to be a bad idea and it took me until 7 a.m. to finally doze off. But all in all, it was a great start to our trip.

We have arrived!

Note: This post is going to be extremely long and not too interesting because I decided to include EVERYTHING that happened to us from our flight to Japan. Hang in there folks!

Althea and I were up bright and early on Friday, June 27th to head towards the airport for our flight to Chicago where we would then catch another flight that would take us directly to Tokyo. Althea's parents were awesome and came to pick me up to the airport.

Once we got to Chicago, we immediately went on a search for a place to sit down and eat breakfast. Choices were limited but we walked to the end of the terminal and it seemed like the only place with an actual area to sit down and eat was Chili's and they were serving breakfast so we went in and plopped onto 2 seats and ordered breakfast with coffee. The food wasn't too bad but the coffee was incredibly terrible so we quickly scarfed down our food so we could go to Starbuck's to get some actual coffee. It wasn't too hard. There were literally 10 Starbuck's all within the 500m long airport terminal. At this point, I was getting really tired and we still had 4 hours before our flight so we sat down at two seats in the waiting area near our departure gate to try to catch some shut-eye. This proved to be incredibly difficult as it was really loud in the waiting area with the flight attendant calling the names of certain passengers over the intercom every 2 minutes or so. Also, I was sitting beside a wall which had construction going on the other side. Althea said it sounded like the Hulk was trying to crash his way through the wall.

Finally, 4 hours later, we boarded onto the direct flight to Tokyo. Once we were in the air, we started talking about how excited we were that in 12 mere hours, we would be in Japan! Well those 12 hours turned out to be the longest 12 hours EVER. I think it had something to do with the fact that I couldn't sleep and the in-flight movies were not very interesting but it really felt like the longest flight I've ever taken in my life. Thankfully near the end of the flight, we were so exhausted that we fell asleep for a good 4 hours.

After we got off the plane and freshened up, we quickly went through immigration where they had this really cute machine that takes your fingerprints and picture. We got our luggage and set off trying to find the computers with free internet access that Kyle mentioned so we could send his phone an email to let him know we had arrived and when he should expect to meet up with us. Unfortunately, the computers weren't actually free and we didn't have 100 yen coins to put into the slot so I went off to get some change. Once I got the change however, a few kids had found the computers and were playing computer games and didn't seem like they were getting off anytime soon. We decided we should just try to call Kyle later instead and set off to the JR ticket office where we would get train tickets on the Narita Express which would take us straight from Narita Airport to Shinjuku station at the heart of central Tokyo. Kyle had mentioned that he was working near Shinjuku and we should just meet him there after he got off work around 6pm. Unfortunately it was already 4:30 at this time and the next train would leave at 5:15 which meant we would arrive at Shinjuku at 6:41 but there was nothing we could do so we got our tickets and left. The people who worked at the JR office were incredibly nice and polite. I had actually gone to the wrong place at first but when the girl who worked there found out what tickets I needed to buy, she immediately pointed me to the right place. She sounded so apologetic as if she had offended me because she didn't have what I needed at her counter when actually I had gone to the wrong counter in the first place. There were also a lot of 'sumi masen' (excuse me/sorry) and 'arigato' (thanks) in our conversation and I'm sure these two phrases would come in handy in the next 5 weeks.

At this point, we were starving so we each bought an onigiri to eat which is basically a ball of rice with a filling of seaweed or fish moulded into a triangular shape and further wrapped in seaweed. Those things were only 115 yen each, roughly $1 CAD and yet so filling which was good since we barely ate on the plane. We still had about 15 minutes before the train left so we found a pay phone to contact Kyle. It says 10 and 100 yen at the top and I didn't really know which was the correct payment so to be safe, I put 100 yen in it and dialed Kyle's phone and was instantly directed to an automated woman's voice repeating a message in japanese. I hung up and tried the number again and again sometimes with the area code and sometimes without in hopes that some combination of that would finally get me to Kyle's phone. No such luck. I found out later that Kyle actually accidentally gave me the wrong phone number. Thanks Kyle.

We only had about 10 minutes left so I told Althea to go back and ask the people at the office that sold the train tickets for assistance. Another 5 minutes pass and Althea is still not back and I'm freaking out because if we didn't leave immediately, we were going to miss our train. I awkwardly rolled all our luggage back to the JR office to grab Althea and raced to the train.

We had made plans with Kyle to meet at the West exit of Shinjuku station around 6 but we arrived at 6:41 and were already late. We wandered around the huge station for about 20 minutes before we got onto the level where the West exit was located. We knew we were going in the right direction when we realised the further we walked, the more people there were. We finally reach the West exit and started to look around for a guy in a suit which wasn't a very helpful description since about half the people in the crowd were wearing suits. I started panicking again (this is going to be a trend) until I turned around and there walking towards us in the crowd was Kyle. Thankfully we weren't too inconspicuous with our luggages in tow so he saw us immediately. He suggested that we head back to his apartment to drop off all our luggage before heading out to dinner...

And that concludes my post. Althea is going to blog about the second part of the day and I promise it will be much more interesting than this. Until next time!

Coming Soon...