The flight + day one

Hello everybody! Greetings from the future.

The current time here is 9:15, Thursday the 8th.

The flight itself wasn't too bad. It was long, to say the least. Really, it felt as if I was locked in time. It was strange because the sun never really seemed to move. 11+ hours of having the sun stay in nearly the exact same spot is quite odd. I tried to stay a sleep through most of it, but that was an unsuccessful attempt. I only slept about 2 and a half hours.

Luckily the person next to me was very kind. He was an American expatriot who now teaches English here in Tokyo. He gave me a lot of pointers.

It was about 2 oclock on Wednesday when we landed. Leaving the airport was pretty easy. Customs was quite quick. I'd say at the longest, I was there about an hour, most of that time spent on waiting for my luggage.

It is about 2 hours by train from Narita to Tokyo. I was reccomended the Narita Express, which costs about 3300 yen. It was a comfortable ride. The area around Narita is quite rural. Alot of small towns. It was quite surreal seeing massive shrines resting off the hills in the distance.

Tokyo itself creeps up quite quickly. One moment you're in the wilderness, then suddenly you're in one of the biggest cities in the world world. One of the things I noticed are that there are giant apartment complexes. I tried to get a picture of some of them from the train, but the glare off the window ruined the pictures. I did manage to get some video of them though, which I'll post later.

Tokyo is divided into several districts, each of which are about as big as downtown LA. The district I'm staying in is Shinjuku, which is quite busy. From the train station, it took me a little while to find my hotel. Everyone that I've talked to have been quite helpful though. When I exited the train station, I asked a vendor if he knew the address. He didn't, so he called his friend, who didn't know. The vendor seemed very upset he couldn't help me. My next step was to visit a koban. Kobans are kind of hard to explain because we don't have them in America, but they are sort of like mini police stations. I went down and asked the officers if they knew where my hotel was. They pulled out a map and scoured it for my hotel. They pointed it out. A business man, who was there reporting a wallet he lost on one of the trains, overheard us, and said he was going in that direction, so he would walk with me for a while and make sure I was going in the right direction. So yeah, very helpful.

I'm going to head out now, so here are some pictures














Shinjuku from outside the train station





















A Japanese vending machine. Very tasty things are inside. I've already spent about 500 yen tasting the various drinks. Each drink is about 110 yen, and are bigger than any drink you can get from a US vending machine. They are literally everywhere here.