Day #2

We arrived in Tokyo airport in the late afternoon. We went through customs quite easily. We didn't have to unpack our bags so that they could search us....we must have looked like innocent little girls...hehe! We thought for sure there would be more security since we were use to it in the US because of the recent September 11th attacks. We were scolded a little by the guy who stamps your passport because we didn't know Hope's address nor the address where we were staying that night....oops!

We found Hope easily. She had been waiting forever because of our delays. She had to take a train from Nagano to Tokyo so she had to leave a the time the train left no matter what. She ended up just shopping for a few hours at the airport. She was so excited to see us and we were excited to see her. It still didn't seem like we were in Japan though even though we were surrounded by Japanese people speaking Japanese. We went to get our money changed from our familiar US currency to the foreign Yen. It was basically 1000 yen equaled $8. We felt rich when we got bills that said 100,000 and 50,000, 20,000, 10,000, 5,000 and 1,000 on them....lol!

We took a commuter rail type train to Tokyo. By this time it was getting dark for the first time in about 24 hours to us....lol! The train we were in was comfy (the seats were cushoned and even had a footrests) and the odd thing was we had assigned seats! We tried looking at the sights that we passed in the dark but it was difficult. We saw rice patties, some run down houses and small little streets.

The train station was only a few minutes away from our hotel. We lugged our stuff there but it felt good to me even though my backpack was a bit heavy. It just felt good to be walking and off my butt. :) The walk was peaceful and even though it was dark I felt safe. We noticed right off how different it was by seeing how tiny the roads were as well as the cars. The cars also drive on the other side of the road. The majority of the people walk or ride bikes though. Another thing we learned right off was to walk on the left side of the sidewalk. If you walk on the right side you WILL get run over by bikes. This was the one thing that I kept forgetting and there were countless times where I would hear the ringing of bicycle bells telling me to get my ass out of the way. We passed some sort of park and zoo on our way from the station to our hotel but we couldn't see it well in the dark.

Our hotel was cute. Very tiny. I barely made it through the door to our room without ducking....and I'm not kidding! Rach and Hope had to take pictures of "amazon Chrissy" in front of the teeny tiny door....lol!



Our room was proportioned to the door. The three beds were crammed in the room and there was only room for a small walkway that lead to the trailor-like bathroom. The funny part of the bathroom was what we called the "self peeing" toilet. When you sat on the seat it ran water in the bowl that sounds like peeing. So the first time we all used it we freaked out and then started laughing hysterically! There were so many controls on the toilet that did various spraying and flushing....it being in Japanese made us learn the symbol of the setting we needed to put it in to flush normally....hehe!

After rummaging through the hotel for a while we set out to see a little bit of Tokyo at night before we hit the sack.



We walked around and the first thing I noticed was that I did NOT like the smell. It was a combination of fish and friedness.....COUGH!!! It was nasty. We tried looking for something to eat but couldn't find any place that Hope deemed good so we settled for some Ramen at the local 7Eleven. The convienent stores in Japan are more classy than ours in the US. They are not considered a trashy place or a bad place to work in Japan....just the opposite.

We brought our Ramen back to the hotel and used the hot water containers (used for tea) in our room to make our dinners. I decided not to eat my Ramen for fear of MSG in them. Since I couldn't read the ingredients (all in Japanese) than I was a little concerned. I was still full from all the airplane food anyway. We then just relaxed and loving being in a bed and not in an airplane seat. Rach iced her ankle with the ice bag she bought at 7Eleven.