my first steps into Asia

Japan….. where do I begin. The days flew by incredibly fast and everything is already blurred together in my head…. and I hardly have time to even think about what happened because in 1 day we’ll be in China! It’s insane. All I can say is I wish I could have spent at least a week in each city we visited and I want to go back and I am just inspired to travel more and more and more.
I guess I’ll just begin with day one, possibly my favorite day----
I woke up at 7 to watch us sailing into land (FINALLY!), then went back to bed until 10. Unfortunately our deck didn’t get called off the ship until about 12 because customs takes so long, but anyhow I stepped into Japan (also my first step in Asia) and a group of us,- Allyn, Lauren, Zach, Margalit, Lawrence, Erin, Lexi, and myself- rushed to find the subway to Yokohama Station so we could go to Kamakura for the day. Kamakura is about 25 minutes away by train and the trains are super efficient and easy to use all over Japan. I could probably travel by train all over Japan now easier than I could take the metro at home around DC. It was a little difficult at first with everything being in Japanese but a lot of people spoke some English and helped us out, so pretty much by the end of our stay I felt like a master of the trains. Anyway, we decided to explore Kamakura and take this hike passing through a bunch of Shinto shrines and ending at the Great Buddha. I found the idea for the hike on wikipedia so I wasn’t really sure where we were going but we eventually found the beginning of it. And wow did it feel amazing to finally hike for hours after being trapped on a ship for ten days. The trail wound around through town, up through the mountains in the woods where it was so tranquil and quiet, up what felt like 500 stairs, through several shrines, and then at some point the arrows kind of ended and we were back down on the road in town not sure where to go. We asked someone for the Daibutsu which means Great Buddha and they pointed us in the right direction. So after a long refreshing hike we ended up at the biggest prettiest Buddha I’ve ever seen. There’s no better way to end a hike than with a giant Buddha sitting peacefully in front of you. I really just wanted to sit there for hours and meditate in front of him but we got there soon before it closed. We left, explored a bit more downtown Kamakura, which is an adorable smaller city and much calmer and quieter than anywhere else we went. Then we took the train back to Yokohama, changed on the ship, and set out to find sushi! It was pretty late and most restaurants were closing, so we asked this Japanese lady where we could find sushi. She was with a man in a business suit and they talked for a little bit and he kept laughing at us. Finally he said to follow him and he would take us, so we all followed him outside down the street for a ways to the 2nd floor of this office building where there were all these hidden restaurants. He took us in a little sushi place and sat down with all 10 of us in this big private table in the back! Then the woman Kazumi, who was his boss, showed up and they had dinner with us! They bought us 2 big bottles of sake and showed us the right way to drink it, and then ordered us edamame, some strange looking but delicious vegetables, and 3 huge sushi platters. It was so neat to talk to them and they were soo friendly to us! It was late on a Tuesday night and the man had obviously just finished work and they just randomly took a bunch of strangers out for dinner! We were the last people in the restaurant so we got to talk to the sushi chef as we left, and then Kazumi insisted on taking us out to another restaurant for dessert! We went to this fancy place and I tried this dish of green tea ice cream with red beans and seaweed cubes (which looked like clear cubes of jelly) with syrup that you pour over top. It was actually really good! Once again, there was about 10 of us and Kazumi insisted on buying each of us a dessert and she wouldn’t let us share. We couldn’t believe how friendly they were and then she gave us her card and said we have to contact her if we come back so we can stay at her house. It was a perfect night to a perfect first day in Japan, and none of us expected that to happen. We were just looking for a place to eat! So we all wandered our way back to the ship- exhausted, happy, loving Japan, and so ready for more.

Hm… I realized I just wrote all that and only got through my first day…. I think I’ll have to be a little more brief from now on. The second day Allyn and I had a trip through SAS which was a Tokyo tour lead by Sofia University students. Our group met the four of them outside the ship and we took the train to Shibuya, the main shopping district in Tokyo. Walking around with them was awesome because they knew the best places to go and took us wherever we wanted. Crazy enough, one of the girls lived in Bethesda MD a few summers ago!! Allyn and I swear we can never escape Montgomery County. So stepping off the train in Tokyo was absolutely breathtaking…. it was Times Square x30. The people and the streets and the signs and the buildings… the sounds and the fashion… I’ve never seen anything like it and I wish there was some way I could show you all. We crossed the main intersection outside the train station and the crosswalks go across each street as well as diagonally… so it was just a mass of people (almost everyone wore black) crossing this enormous intersection. On one side was the biggest Starbucks I have ever seen- it took up the first 2 floors of this office building. I found Starbucks and McDonalds to be pretty popular throughout all of Japan and I spotted a few KFCs too. So just winding around the streets of Shibuya and taking it all in was overwhelming… everything was so colorful and massive and over the top. I can’t even find the right words. We walked around and stopped at this stand where the students said we had to try these popular “octopus pancakes” (I forget what they’re called) but they’re basically balls of fried pancake dough with octopus inside—and absolutely delicious! I highly recommend it if you ever come across them. We walked over to Harajuku and down Takeshita street, the main narrow shopping street of Harajuku where every single Japanese girl is dressed up in the most insane outfits. The fashion was incredible and I wanted to buy everything! We passed Hello Kitty shops where we tried mini hello kitty waffles filled with chocolate, and a whole Tamagotchi store where they sell tamagotchi donuts and Allyn of course bought a real tamagotchi. There were tons of crepe stands where they sell crepes wrapped like ice cream cones filled with ice cream and fruit and chocolate- umm YUM! Then we split up and Allyn and I went with a few others and the 2 Japanese boys to find sushi while the others and the 2 girls went to eat somewhere else. Hard to believe but we couldn’t find sushi, so we went to this little underground Japanese restaurant. I found that sushi restaurants are less common than just regular Japanese restaurants which are everywhere, and they have dishes like ramen, udon, eggs, pork, and various rice dishes with meat or vegetables. I thought sushi would be everywhere! So at this restaurant we tried maccha, which is real Japanese green tea, and it’s basically just a ground powder of green tea leaves mixed in hot water- very bitter and different than our green tea but interesting. After lunch we took a train to the electronics district where the streets were literally lined with stores and markets selling everything electronic you can imagine. The guys took us into this insane arcade which beats any arcade I’ve seen in the US, and then there’s a room just full of different photo booths where you can change your face to have bigger eyes like the Japanese girls like and put different backgrounds behind you. Everything was just way over the top! We met back up with the girls and decided to end the day going to Tokyo Tower where you can see the whole Tokyo city skyline. It was a breathtaking view. Allyn and I then said our goodbyes to the students who took the rest of the group back to the ship in Yokohama, and we got on a train to the Asakusa district of Tokyo where our capsule hotel was! I had no idea what to expect of a capsule hotel other than picturing a tiny cubby in the wall. We were planning to meet up at the hotel with our friends Lauren, Margalit, Erin, Lawrence, Ashley, Patrick, Matt, and Zach, and then go out to a karaoke bar for the night. We actually all got to the hotel at the same time and finally got a chance to relax for a second. The hotel was actually so much nicer than I expected! (other than the shower which was a communal room with a bucket you sat on and poured water over yourself) but each floor had a room with bathrooms, lockers for your stuff, and then a hall of capsules which were basically a bed with a tv in them. It was perfect :) So the group of us set out finding a place to eat, and we finally wandered into this place where there was absolutely no English. There were little grills in the middle of each table so we finally figured out it was a shabu shabu restaurant, where you order raw meat or vegetables and then grill it yourself. We were split into 2 tables so we each just pointed to random Japanese characters on the menu and hoped for the best. Our table was relatively lucky-- we ended up with raw beef, mushrooms, cabbage, and what looked like chicken skins. But the other table was not as fortunate…. they got chicken beaks and cow livers…. yum? It was an experience for sure. After dinner we happened to find Zach and Isaac and then we found a karaoke bar. Karaoke is much different in Japan- basically your group rents out a private room with a big tv in it and you’re allowed to stay the whole night there until about 6am. Zach and Isaac just decided to sleep there because they didn’t have a place to stay but we were excited to sleep in our capsules. Karaoke was soo much fun, we spent hours singing and dancing and had no voices left by the end. All of us except Zach and Isaac left around 3 and went back to our capsule hotel to get the little rest that we could before our next adventure in Japan!

Allyn and I woke up at about 7 the next morning to get an early start on our day. We wanted to spend a little more time in Tokyo and then get on the 2-hour train to Kyoto before it got too late. We realized from the night before how difficult it is to travel in big groups so we just decided to break off on our own. Plus we wanted to go shopping in Harajuku and shopping is impossible with too many people! So we left, took the train to Shibuya, and somehow found it extremely simple to navigate our way around! Right away we found the streets we took the day before and made our way right to Harajuku. It turned out to be a big holiday in Japan (I think it was Founder’s Day), so we found ourselves on the main street of Harajuku where there was about to be a huge parade! We watched it for a while and then went back down the tiny Takeshita street in Harajuku to take our time and do some real shopping :)  I can’t get over how adorable all the Japanese girls are- they have the greatest fashion and made me feel disgusting after I haven’t showered and was wearing the same clothes I’ve worn for days.
After we had our fill of shopping and realized how much money we were spending, Allyn and I got on the bullet train headed for Kyoto. This is where the exhaustion started to kick in. It felt so nice to sit for 2 hours on a train and not have to carry our backpacks full of 4 days worth of stuff. We got to Kyoto Station at about 4pm and wow it was not what I expected. I pictured Kyoto as more of a rural, smaller town area with temples and gardens spread throughout. Just the Kyoto Station alone blew my mind. I wish I took a picture of this massive place- it’s 10 stories high and had to cover several acres- I think the most expansive building I’ve ever seen- and it had about 5 different shopping malls, escalators and stairs and hallways going every which way…. it was just an overwhelming maze. We walked around for about an hour getting lost and trying to find the tourist bureau so we could find a hostel to stay in. I am 100% positive I could navigate my way around all of Tokyo easier than I could in this one building. We finally found the tourist center where we got a map and found out where this one hostel was that our friend Emily who we ran into in Harajuku was staying in. Unfortunately it had begun pouring rain and we weren’t ready to try and find our way to this hostel just yet so we decided to explore and get lost in the station for a little longer. You wouldn’t believe how many sweets shops and pastry shops there are- I don’t know if it was because Valentine’s Day was so close or what, but every single shop was just selling boxes and boxes of sweets and chocolate and mochi and green tea everything. There were tons of pastry shops where you just walk in and are surrounded by pastries of every sort which you just scoop into bags. Allyn got one that turned out to be filled with seaweed and fish… definitely not the chocolate she expected. We decided to try and find a sushi restaurant for dinner so we asked a cop and he lead us to a conveyor belt sushi place! Of course who do we see in there but a bunch of SAS kids…. they’re everywhere! The first sushi I pulled off the belt was this little bowl with some kind of roll with fish inside. I wondered why it was in a bowl and the chef came over and was like motioning me to fill it with hot water. I was a little skeptical but I filled it and then he mixed it all together for me—it was a strange idea but soo good! Apparently you can mix it with green tea also. Anyway, we ate so much sushi—a lot which I had no idea what I was eating—but it was all delicious. Full and happy we left the station and decided to get a taxi to the hostel. It was only a minute away but they ended up being full, so we walked in the rain down the street to another. It was cheap and we got our own bathroom and shower so it was all we needed. At this point we were rough—dead tired, wet, and dirty. Our room was just a square with tatami mats and a rolled up mattress to sleep on, but it was perfect. A hot shower was amazing and being able to put our backpacks down was even more amazing. It was still relatively early but we had no idea where to go in this surprisingly ginormous city, nor did we really want to go out in the rain, so we just decided to make the 2 minute walk back to the station to look around and get lost more. The shops in the malls started to close so we were out of luck but we spent a little time just looking at all the cool foods and sweets in the convenience stores and gift shops…. I could literally spend hours just looking at all the unique foods and candies. As everything was closing down we just decided to go back to the hostel and get some rest for our next day in Kyoto, and pray for better weather!

In the morning the sky was still pretty gray and drizzly, but at least it had stopped pouring. I wanted to see a Buddhist temple and a Shinto shrine that my religion professor had recommended to me, so we set out on a bus to find the Kiyomizu-dera temple. We got off on the right stop but didn’t know exactly where to find the temple, so we wandered around the little streets until we saw what we thought might be it. After going inside and looking around we found out it was probably someone’s house and then a woman came out and told us where Kiyomizu was. Oops! So we finally found it, up in the mountains past this long narrow street of gift and souvenir shops. The whole complex was elaborate and beautiful—the ornate pagodas and the bright colors and beautiful architecture—it was all stunning, even on an ugly day. After spending a while there taking it all in and seeing the view of Kyoto city beneath us, we left back down the street and went into some shops where they had samples of all the cool looking sweets I wanted to try! They had green tea everything you can imagine- green tea chocolate, green tea cookies, little triangles of green tea mochi with chocolate bean paste inside—it was all so delicious and different. So we then got back on the bus to try and find the Heian Jingu Shrine, another beautiful complex of ornate orange and green structures with a huge courtyard in the middle. Beyond the buildings are extensive gardens that I imagine are gorgeous in the springtime. We left to make it to the train station by 2 so I could get back to the ship in Kobe in time for my FDP (like a field trip for one of my classes) and we made it just in time. My FDP was going to a Japanese pop music livehouse club, which turned out to be one of the most popular in Kobe. It was an underground place and reminded me a lot of the 930 club except it was even much smaller (but considered big for most live houses in Japan) and everyone sits at tables and chairs. There were 3 different performers but they all kind of played together at different points. The first was this trio of younger guys who played like a soft rock and they were really fun and good. Then a younger girl named Leyona came on and sang for a while- she was really good and her voice kind of sounds like Corrine Bailey Rae. Then this really quirky and funny pianist came on, who was apparently a special guest, and he was amazing and really funny.  At the end this 70-year old Japanese rocker with long hair came out and played rock songs… he even sang “I can’t get no Satisfaction” in English! Apparently he was a big hit back when the Beatles were popular and so all the young performers had a great time playing with him. I was having such a great time and it was funny to think that this was part of my school work, and that we could be there dancing and ordering drinks with my professor. Definitely the best field trip ever!

I wish I had more time to see Kobe because it looked like such a neat city from what I saw walking to the live house the night before. But my last day in Kobe I had another FDP which was back in Kyoto participating in a traditional tea ceremony at one of the temples. This was really neat and definitely something I wanted to experience. We sat on mats along the walls of the tea room in the Shunko-in temple, and an old Japanese woman who is a tea master carefully prepared the maccha tea in front of us and then served it along with 2 rice cookies. The tea was the same traditional powdery bitter stuff I had in the restaurant in Tokyo, and you had to eat your cookies and then drink it all in 3 or 4 gulps. I actually didn’t mind the bitterness but the texture is thick and sort of foamy, not your typical tea.
We got back to the ship at exactly on-ship time, about 6:00, and I was about ready to get in bed and sleep for 2 days until China. Everyone on the ship was so excited and talking about all their stories but dead at the same time, and most people slept through their classes the next day. I of course had a paper due at 8am which I had to write about the tea ceremony so I was up all night :(

Wow- I can’t believe how much I had to write to cover Japan, and this doesn’t even come close to covering all my thoughts and feelings. I loved that each day was a completely new and different adventure and I got a taste of so many major cities. I know I’ll say this for every country but I REALLY want to come back and spend a longer time in all of these cities! I felt like we were always on the rush and on the go but we got to do so much. It was a great feeling to travel independently too and find our way from city to city without knowing any of the language or much about these places at all! I was really worried and stressed out beforehand because we didn’t have very detailed plans or places to stay and I am bad at navigating on transportation systems…. but I found it all to be so so easy, and so many people were willing to help us out. This really makes me never want to stop traveling and lucky for me, I still have 3 months and 7 countries to go!!

Thank Buddha I finished writing Japan, because China is TOMORROW!
-Michele