10:45 am JST (6:45 pm Wednesday, May 13, PST)

Tuesday ended with descent into Japan. After a long drive from Narita International Airport to Tokyo (when we first took off we were all terrified but then remembered that in Japan one drives on the other side of the road), we checked into our very nice hotel (my roommate, Lindsey, and I had a room with a great view of the beautiful garden) and looked around a bit. I changed my clothes to go out to dinner with Tad, Pete, Scott, and a one-time Peninsula College (PC) exchange student, Mitsuko. I was extremely underdressed. Every person in Tokyo wears suits and very nice clothes, which looks spectacular, but left me feeling rather unstylish in jeans & running shoes. Tokyo is very classy, very safe, very cramped, and very BIG. Mitsuko took us to the subway, where you buy a ticket and insert it into this machine you walk through, where it pops up at the other end and you grab it. I of course forgot to grab it that first time, and she pointed frantically as I leapt back to get it. The subway was interesting - very clean, with bright ads and little TV screens everywhere. After getting off we walked down a street in the college district to what appeared to be a little booth. Going in, we saw a descending staircase, which we went down. It led to a surprisingly large restaurant filled with loud, smoking college kids. (Just about everyone smokes in Japan.) The idea was, Mitsuko would select the dinner, and we would eat it. Soon plate after plate of exquisite Japanese food arrived at our table, including rice, sushi, shrimp, beef, chicken, cucumber, etc., and this cool plate of raw beef that you cooked yourself. At first I was quite clueless about using the chopsticks, but I watched and imitated Mitsuko, and got to be pretty decent with them. We had ice cream - vanilla, strawberry, and green tea - for dessert. It was a lot of fun, especially listening to her order the food. :) After dinner, we walked around the area, which was very colorful, cramped, and neat. We went into a game center (a machine with Sailormoon on it caught my eye but we walked right past it, darn) and had our pictures taken in a little photo booth, which is VERY popular in Japan. There are little photo booths everywhere! These aren't the lame polaroid ones we have in the States. You take one picture, and the machine spits out a sheet of about 16 small STICKERS of the picture!! Sugoi! (cool!) The photo booths talk to you or play music, as does just about everything in Japan. The subway even plays a litte tune when it makes stops. Cute. ^^ We rode the subway back to the the station near the hotel, and I got back in my room around 11:00 pm JST (my key wouldn't work and I had to ring the doorbell and wake Lindsey up... eep...) and took a shower, then stared out the window at the lighted garden and went to bed. The air conditioning in our room worked, thankfully, because it is very hot in Tokyo, even at night. We woke up the next morning (Wednesday) at 4:00 am JST, thinking of going to the Tsukiji (sp?) fish market. Lindsey did (it turned out to be closed). I stayed back thinking I'd go to sleep, but I wasn't tired, so I sprang out of bed and went about getting ready for the day. (Up for 2 days straight, 5 hours of sleep, foreign food, and I wasn't tired! I have the feeling it will catch up with me eventually, however. ~_~) I was planning to go with the high school students during our first day in Tokyo, because they were going to be trotting around the city and visiting a lot of interesting things. So I waited around, had (American) breakfast at the hotel, and visited the hotel gift shop. I went to the teeny bathroom and, while sitting there, noticed a small box on the wall opposite me, with a large button on it. Of course, my curiosity got the better of me, and I hit the button. The box responded with a rather noisy flushing sound. I thought it was some kind of joke, but I was later told that the box was designed like that on purpose - if you were "making a lot of noise" on the toilet, you hit the button, and the flushing sound covered it up. ^_^ After that experience, I met Mrs. Gilley and the high schoolers in the lobby at 9:00 am JST. We joined up with our guide, Natsumo, a nice Japanese girl some of them knew. We rode the subway (getting to be old hat :) and walked a little ways though a nice park (up a lot of stairs :P) to a Shinto shrine. It's interesting because you walk under this huge wooden gate-type thing, and there's this rather wide gravel path that extends back though beautiful forest greenery. In the middle of Tokyo, there's this peaceful, quiet, serene forest. The big gravel path goes on for a while, there's some more big wooden gates, and then you hit the shrine, which is a beautiful example of Japanese architecture. It's quite big, and there were a lot of uniformed Japanese students - including a kawaii group of what appeared to be kindergarten kids - there, along with tourists, religious Japanese, etc. I didn't participate in the wishing/blessing/drinking of sacred water routines, they're against my beliefs, but was impressed. There were stores selling charms (with girls dressed like Rei-chan from that anime show :)  Sarabeth, one of our group, blessed her feet at the wishing area and tripped all over herself the rest of the day, much to our amusement. (On the way home, we told her not to bless the plane. ^_^) We then returned to the subway to travel to the Tokyo Art Museum. (The following are little notes I jotted down - I'll expand later) *Museum - armor, calligraphy, kimonos, swords, etc. *College street filled with sugoi stores - I got a SM drawing board, 2 neko shirts *Buhddist temple (2 big red things, shopping street) - I got SM fans, spoon *subway *then, go back to hotel, rest, meet in lobby *dinner in Chinese restaurant (I had rice, with chopsticks! everone else had ramen) *Ginza - color, lights, big ads, cool  *long subway ride "home"

*sarabeth, lindsey & I went down a ways to a big bridge over the road, took pictures, walked back (street full of vending machines) *back in, shower, go to bed (In my journal I wrote "I'll finish this later. I'm gonna go to the store on the shinkansen (bullet train) here. 11:15 am JST, Thursday." We were on the shinkansen headed for Mutsu City when I wrote the above entry. I never got around to finishing Wednesday (I'll do that here) but here's what I wrote on the shinkansen:) Today, Thursday - up early, pack, eat breakfast, walk to the station, pack ourselves like sardines onto the subway, wait around in the bullet train station for an hour, buy candy and a Japanese fashion magazine, get on the bullet train (lower level), ride, ride, ride! (As a side note, I should mention that all of our luggage had been shipped to Mutsu the night we arrived at the hotel, so we had to carry around everything we would need until we got there - clothes, shampoo, etc. It kind of sucked hauling all of that on the subway.) More Shinkansen notes, from my journal: Everybody has a cel phone, the small variety they carry around in their back pockets, and a lot of people have laptops, like the guy sitting next to me. The subway today!...!!! We watched it pull into the station, packed with people, and were like "We're getting on THAT?" It was like a sardine can! You couldn't move an inch. Everyone was pressed against the glass, the seats, each other, everything. It was madness. I was pulled about five different directions by my various bags. My legs, if I had been standing alone, would have never been able to support me in that position, but luckily (?!?) I had a whole carfull of people around me. The shinkansen is cool. Very fast. It's true what they say. We're sitting on the lower lever and have a great view of the walls that protect from de-railings (I assume) but I can see a bit of scenery flashing by over the top of it. We're approaching Sendai, where Masatoshi-san (my penpal) is!! I'd really like to meet him. Maybe in Narita, after we get back from Mutsu. He's neat. 11:50 am, JST (7:50 pm Wednesday, PST)    As we got off the train a group of Mutsu people had gathered in a line, each with a letter, and spelled out "Welcome." It was kawaii! (Although at first they'd been standing in the wrong place, and then after running to where the train stopped, they couldn't get the letters in order! ^^) We got on the bus and began our drive to Mutsu. As we progressed towards northren Japan the scenery became more and more wild and less modern-feeling. Rice patties lined the tracks. We were obviously entering a different Japan - not urban and concrete and busy like Tokyo, but more traditional and green and calm. At first I was apphrehensive about entering "old" Japan, after the excitement and color of Tokyo, but I figured I'd enjoy it. There was a lot more countryside than I'd expected! Somehow, I think most foreigners imagine Japan as one giant Tokyo, but it's not that way at all. You'd think that with as many people that are crammed onto that small island nation, they'd spread out and live on every inch of land available to them, but we found ourselves staring at miles of rolling, uninhabited scenery. We stopped for tofu donuts at a little donut shop (they were excellent! And we got the most kawaii little Coke cans! :), and finally arrived at Mutsu City Hall. We went into this room facing a group of Japanese people, some host families, and some who had come just to see us. One by one we stood up and called out the name of our family, who would come forward and shake our hands or give is a hug. My family was the Akira Soga family, and after the small introduction I hauled my many suitcases into his car (too much stuff! I brough too much stuff!), tried to get into the driver's seat thinking it was the passenger seat (the steering wheels are on the other side), and finally went to his house. Akira-san's house was very nice. His little wife, Leiko, came out to greet us. He spoke rather decent English, but she spoke only a word or two. She would talk and talk in Japanese and end everything with an upturned "ne?" like "understand?" or "see?" My first experience with the taking-the-shoes-off thing was a bit of a disaster, but they laughed their heads off about it, so I guess it was OK. *0_0* We had a nice spread of a (sit on the floor) dinner, and I don't think I recognized a single thing on the table except the sashimi, or raw fish. (How could you miss it? :) But I tried everything, and struggled a bit with the chopsticks, which brought laughter from the Sogas. After dinner they took me to my room upstairs and showed me how to put out the futon and put it away in the morning. I showered in their interesting shower/bath room, which looks like a bathroom all by itself. The deep tub was to the left, and the top of it was even with the floor, where one stood and showered. It was strange, also because there was a large window in the room, made of that sort of "pixelated" glass, and I was paranoid that people would see me. But I got through OK, and went back upstairs to sleep on my futon.