We're Here!

We arrived in Japan at 2pm but it felt like 2am to us. We hadn't slept much on the plane but the exhilaration of finally being here kept us going for quite awhile. Once we were off of the plane we went through customs without a hitch and made our way over to the Japan Rail (JR) office to pick up our rail passes. They gave us the passes and tickets into Tokyo and sent us on our way. What they didn't tell us is that the tickets couldn't be used like everyone else was using their tickets so rather than inserting our tickets and passing easily through the turnstile/gate we had them close on our legs. Eventually we discovered that we just needed to show the guards our pass and ignore the actual ticket all together. We're getting much better at the rail system now. Anyway, after a train change, we made it to our neighborhood Ikebukuro and our hotel House Ikebukuro.

The hotel is really cute and we get to sleep on traditional Japanese mats. They sound like they might be pretty uncomfortable but they're really not. What we didn't expect is the heat! It's about 95 degrees or so here and very humid. Our room has air conditioning but we sweat everywhere else we go. We thought we were leaving this behind in Texas!



We were pretty hungry when we got to the hotel so after checking in we went out to search for something to eat. We found several little streets with restaurants and discovered something amazing-- even though everything is in Japanese, the restaurants put little plastic models of all of their food in display cases so that we could actually see what we would be eating. This made it pretty easy to rule a few places out and find one that looked good. We walked into the one that we had decided on right after a couple of Japanese girls and saw them go over to a vending machine. We were totally confused by what was going on but we then figured out that you supposed to insert your money and select your meal from the vending machine! It spits out two tickets and gives you your change and then you take your seat. Our waitress came over, took our tickets, gave us some tea and said something in Japanese. We looked at her blankly. She eventually gave up on us and left. She went back into the kitchen (where we could see them laughing and looking over at us) and came back a little later with our food. Even with all of the assistance that we had, it still wasn't really what we were expecting but it was really good!