Japan: Post 1

Hello-
I just returned from my time in Japan. Japan was awesome! Seems like that is my response after every country!  Our time in Japan coming to a conclusion though was very bittersweet. Japan is our last international port, and as our ship pulled away from the dock it felt like the end of one chapter. I was very sad to see my trip begin to come to a close, but I am also very anxious to get home and see my family and friends!  Now we have 10 days at sea en route to Hawaii. It is our longest ever stretch at sea and I am nervous about that. We have only gone a maximum of seven days before, and at the end of seven days we were all so anxious to see land and get off the ship, I can’t imagine what we will be like after 10 days. It will be a hard stretch at sea too because we will have tests and final exams in some classes as well as final projects and papers due.  We will also have Thanksgiving during this stretch. On November 28th, we will cross the International Date Line, so we will have November 28th TWICE. Then we will finally go from being hours ahead of home, to suddenly hours behind home!

In Japan, two good friends and myself decided to travel independently. That means that we did not have anything organized through Semester at Sea and decided to tackle Japan on our own! The first day we arrived in Yokohama we got on a train to Tokyo.. We were staying our first night in Tokyo at a hostel in Asakusa, so we took subways and trains to Asakusa. We arrived at our hostel and were pleased to find out that it was a very nice place! We dropped our heavy backpacks off and went to explore Tokyo. We found a really cool temple and shopping market.  We wandered around Tokyo for the evening and ended up finding an inexpensive burger place for dinner. It was delicious!  We decided to go bowling in the evening so we had to figure out how to get to another district of Tokyo. We wanted to walk, but we found out it was a much longer walk than we had expected, and took nearly an hour to find our way to the bowling lane. The bowling was fun (I lost as expected), and then we headed back to our hostel. By the time we arrived at our hostel we were exhausted and went right to bed!

The second day in Tokyo we had LOTS of time to spend before boarding our overnight train. We decided to seep in a little bit, then we headed towards the Shibuya district. Shibuya is one of the areas with all the big lights and tall buildings with lots of shopping and restaurants. We were overwhelmed with the number of people though. It was so packed. We wandered up the road looking for something to eat. It was all very expensive though. We found both a shakeys pizza, and an outback steakhouse, but both were out of our budget. We decided instead to get a crepe at a crepe stand. It was very good, mine was chocolate and banana flavored Yum!  When we were finished in Shibuya we headed back towards Tokyo station. We decided to wander from Tokyo station and came across a very nice park to take a break in. There was a wedding going on near by, so we watched that for a while and relaxed in the park. We wandered around then returned to Tokyo station for dinner. It was very good, and lucky for us, we were able to waste 2.5 hours while getting dinner because we were early for our overnight bus to kyoto. We found a place in the station where we could sit with our backpacks and wait for our bus. I found a pay phone and got to call home, which was great!  Once it was close to boarding time, we headed upstairs and got on our bus! It seemed like it would be kind of comfortable, and by then we were exhausted anyways. We tried to get comfy and we were all asleep within a short time. The bus made stops almost ever hour or two though, so we would wake up a lot during the night.