Tokyo Orientation

The first three days in Japan. Japan was amazing, of course. Even the bus ride from Narita International Airport to Tokyo, about one-and-a-half hours round-trip, was an experience. Everything is amazing when it's new! Old graveyards, those distinctive Japanese roofs, and no pictures! Ha! Actually, there's a lot of industrial junk between Tokyo and Narita so it wasn't really photogenic.

The 3 days at the Keio Plaza Hotel were pretty fun. Many, many, many of the talks were boring and useless. I even included a picture of one. Basically, all of the official speakers said "please try hard," and all of the other JET speakers told us generic information and gave us cliches about the time of our lives. Still, the free time, what little there was, was quite fun!

I hung out almost entirely with Hawaii people, and was rooming with Micah (tall, white, and bald) and Brian (short, Japanese, dark tan). On day one we really only had enough time to grab some food, and we hit a noodle shop a block or so away from our hotel. There were enough of us and we left early enough that we snagged a tatami mat room and had some fun making noise on our first night in Tokyo.

The Keio Plaza was a very nice hotel, but you're not going to see any pictures except looking out at the views. I just didn't really care that much about the conference part of the Tokyo stay.

Unfortunately, we got out too late to see anything really interesting. I took a couple of walks by myself to attempt to get into the park nearby, but it was always closed. I also made a brief stop at the book store near the park, and I regret not buying a road map.

The 2nd night in Tokyo we hit the town looking for dinner, and ending up eating in a department store "restaurant" near Shibuya. Shibuya is like Harajuku (basically, all the funky dressed people go there), except there are actually people there at night. Dinner was good, but the restaurant turned out to be an appetizer bar and we got ripped on the $3 chunks of tofu that they gave us without us asking. It was good tofu, but $3 for a little square?

Night #3 was clearly the best. We didn't know where to go, so one of the Hawaii girls, Krystal, mentioned that she had studied abroad here and stayed with a host family in Tokyo. They owned an izakaya (small bar) a few stops past Shibuya and we decided to give it a shot. We hopped on the train, then a taxi, and then walked to the bar. It was amazing! They kept giving us free beers and great bar food. The patrons were funny and nice. The host family showed us their house, and it was basically a slice of Hawaii. I mean, there were a total of 17 surfboards all over the walls! Aloha frames, pillows, wall-hangings.... Quite a nice last little piece of Hawaii to take with us when we left Tokyo the next day.