Turning Japanese

Touched down in Osaka Japan about 4 days ago, and it's been a whirlwind of activity since.

The night before departing, I got very little sleep in all of my excitement, but figured I would catch up on my sleep on the 13+ hours of travel time that we were logging en route to Osaka.

The plane ride was fairly smooth albeit a total wack job sitting behind us (of course) that had taken some serious drugs to fall asleep-so much so that the stewardesses could not wake him up to so much as buckle his seatbelt for take off.

Touched down in Osaka at around 5:15 pm, and made our way through customs, and found our way to the baggage forwarding service. Since we are doing a great deal of travel around Japan, and the spaces on trains are limited (plus, we packed a lot of different clothes to accomodate for the different areas we'd be visiting), we decided to forward one of our bags to Okinawa, and the other to our hotel in Tokyo-leaving us with one small suitcase for both of us to share. Since we know about 5 words in Japanese, and the baggage service people knew just about as much English, we just hoped we would meet up with our bags again and wouldn't be left to the same outfit for 2 weeks.

After checking our bags, we tried to figure out our way to the hotel via the rail station. I'm thankful that I made a printout that indicated which stop to get off at because the people at the "Tourist Information Desk" at the airport would have had us getting off at completely the wrong place. So, several "sumi-masen's" (excuse me's) later, we found our hotel. By this point it's about 8, and we are so exhausted from travel and so hungry. We wearily walked around the 'hood of our hotel, looking for food. Sushi?? No sushi restaurants apparently nearby. We found a cute little restaurant that was basically a small counter and a small table in the back. The table was packed of smoking business men (which I have noticed is the norm in Japan so far), and 2 men at the counter, one of whom was a ringer for the Japan’s version of Jerry Garcia.

We opened the menu-all Japanese. No pictures, and no plastic food to point to. Al and I shrugged and he yelled out Omikase! to the chef-which mean's chef's choice. About 6 courses later, we realized the chef/bartender/bus boy/waiter was making us a full Japanese meal. Our eyes glazed over--tofu, followed by sashimi, followed by an omelet, followed by seared tuna, followed by noodles, followed by fish. We finally motioned that we had enough, and went back to our TINY little room. I was thankful that we had fowarded our bags, because there was barely room for us in the room let alone our bags.

Woke up the next day after another restless night, and did a bit of touring around Osaka-went to the Osaka-jo palace. and went to Osaka-jo, a castle in Osaka that is one of Hideyoshi Toyotojmi’s finest buildings built in 1583.

From the castle, we went to Umeda to go look at the HEP 5 stores and get a bite to eat. We sat down in an Udon restaurant, but my jet lag caught up with me, and I wasn’t hungry, I was just a big grump. I didn’t eat my meal—I just was at the point of exhaustion that I could not stomach anything at all. With the exception of a McDonalds cheeseburger. I haven’t eaten at McDonald’s in 2 years, and chose our trip in Japan to break that habit. I think my body just needed some nourishment, and fish stock and noodles (which was about all we could find in Osaka) just wouldn't cut it.

After that, we decided it would be best just to make our way to Tokyo. We boarded the Shinkasen train, and I was able to finally catch a few zzz's on the train. The ride was about 3 hours, but really comfortable.

We arrived in Tokyo, again having to battle the rail way system. There is the JR line and the subway, and the two were mind boggling on such little sleep. We got ourselves pretty turned around, and literally about 2 hours later found our hotel. After stopping several people and bowing about 100 times to say thank you to everyone who helped us, we made it to our hotel.

The experience on the rail was interesting-lots of people wear masks here-very germaphobic, and EVERYONE is texting on their cute little phones. Also, everyone has a charm on their phones, very reminiscent of the charm bracelets of the 80's, including the men. I of course have snatched up a Hello Kitty charm for myself. How could I resist??

We settled into our hotel-found a quick bento box dinner. Stumbling our way back home, we walked through our hotel's beautiful garden surrounded by the magnificent cherry trees (which totally beat DC's by every stretch of the imagination.). As we wondered through, we ran into a group of Japanese men and women dining outside under a tree. They were laughing and having a great time, and before I knew it, they had asked us to join them! We sat with them drinking whiskey, eating fruit, and trying to understand each other. From what I could glean, they were here for a high school reunion. The whole encounter was hysterical, and they wanted to know all about us and how we were liking Japan. They were so hospitable, and we enjoyed sitting with them.

After drinks we tried again to sleep-but no luck. The next day we woke up early for our tour-which was a full day of Tokyo sights.

Our day included a visit to the Tokyo tower (14 feet taller than Eiffel Tower), a tea ceremony at Happo-en Gardens(which was very lovely, and quite a unique ritual to take part in), a barbecue lunch (think Benihana without the twirling of the knives and the tossing of shrimp in your mouth). After that, we went to the Imperial Palace Plaza (home of the Emperor), followed by a river cruise on the Sumida River. We ended the tour at the Asakusa Kannon Temple-the oldest and most popular Buddhist temple in Tokyo. After the tour, Al and I opted to head to Ginza-the shopping district.

The department stores are known for their food stalls on the bottom level, and so we decided to check out the stores and the food stalls-which was amazing.

Anyways, this has run on long enough, will blog about the next day soon. For now, we are having a great time, and adjusting to the culture. We've somewhat figured out the train system, and have learned to laugh at oursleves a great deal.

More to come...sayonara.