Japan Day One

Before you start reading, i'd like to tell you that we are back in Korea. Jamie wrote these updates every night of our trip. Super dedicated! Anyway, I'm going to post one a day so that all of you avid readers won't get overwhelmed with 12 days all in one post. I'll try to post the pictures for each day with the post as well. Just comment if you want more detail or explanation and I'll try to answer promptly and quickly. (more quickly than normal)

Day 1 (August 11)

So here we are in Japan on the first day of our journey. Well, evening, as we left Seoul around 7:30PM and just arrived in Tokyo at about 9:45PM, a pretty quick and painless flight! We used a smaller airport (think Bradley International or TF Green for all of the folks out in the MA area), and came into a nice little (not so little) airport to the south of Tokyo called Haneda. Getting to our hostel/motel (Sakura hotel) wasn’t too difficult but a little bit nerve-wracking in the moment, as we found the train system is quite a bit more complex than the one in Seoul and there is not nearly as much English (at least on the lines on the outskirts of the city). Anyways, there was actually no problem whatsoever and we made it to our first stop in one piece no problem! Yay! And when we got to our guesthouse, who do we see right in front of the door but our friend Dave! What a small world! OK OK, it was not a coincidence at all, we planned to meet up with him the whole time! We’ll be spending about 3 days with him in Tokyo before we split off and go to Kyoto to stay with a friend and see what that area has to offer. The man who is running the guesthouse is super friendly and pointed out that the Japanese coinage, while almost identical to that of Korea, is about 11-12 X more valuable so don’t mix them up! They seem to use coins much more here instead of small bills – one of them is 500 yen which is more than 5 dollars and I think more than 6000 Korean won. The Japanese had to change their coinage, actually, because Koreans would come over here and use their 500 won coins instead of the 500 yen coins in the vending machines.

Which leads to interesting Japanese things of the day. OK not much to comment on yet as we’ve only been in the country for a couple hours, but one thing we’ve heard about and already noticed is the vending machine culture. There are over 5 million vending machines in Japan, which is about 1 vending machine for every 24-25 people. They bring in over 50 billion USD in revenue a year (or 5 trillion yen), and folks can find anything from soda to fresh vegetables to a wide variety adult oriented offerings ranging from strange to downright creepy.

Anyways, we’ll have much to comment on tomorrow and its approaching 1AM now so we will enjoy sleeping in our tiny cubicle (its like half a dorm room, but its cozy – I love the wallpaper, its textured!). I tried to take some pictures but its too small to take good photos in. Good night!