Last time in the blogosphere....

So with the service announcement out of the way I'll pick up my story where we left off.


We got off the plane and went into the airport. Apparently everyone on our flight was taking an international connecting flight so there weren't many people around when we went through Immigration. This went a lot smoother than I expected. We had our forms all filled out on the plane and went and handed them to the official, got our fingerprints scanned, and our photo taken. Some of us had a bit more trouble with the finger scan than others. : )

Once through there we got our bags and went through customs, which was even less of a hassle.

Now we just had to figure out how to get to out hotel near Shinjuku Station, quite a ways away. Luckily there is an express train that takes you there from the airport with only 2 other stops. We bought our tickets and went to get on the train when I realized I didn't have my ticket. I was panicking and looking around dreading having to buy another ticket. Then I noticed the cashier lady from whom I had purchased the tickets looking around with a ticket in her hand. She had come to find me with my ticket that I had dropped on the ground! I was relieved to say the least.

We got on the train with relief, we just sat back and enjoyed the ride. It was a little surreal cause it hadn't quite sunk in that we were in Japan. Riding on the train through the country side it was a bit like Iowa, just replace cornfields with rice paddies.

As we got closer to Tokyo it started hitting more, just looking at all the buildings and seeing flashes of settings from manga. It was just cool.

We got to Shinjuku Station and after climbing up 3 levels or so got to the main floor and smack dab into the middle of a crowd. It was pretty crazy after not been around a large group of people for so long. (the train was mostly empty, and all the levels below the main one had very few people). We just stood there and took it in for a little bit. We weren't sure how to get out of the station as all the pass gates seemed to work in both directions and were open until you tried to walk through them (yes we tried this, not knowing you had to put your ticket through again when leaving the station). With that out of the way we had a leisurely walk to our hotel. We noticed on our way that there is a Krispy Kreme just outside of our hotel. HA take that Iowa City and surrounding areas we gots ourselves a Krispy Kreme. I'll have to report on how it compares in a later post.

Well we got checked in and into our rooms by about 8 pm local time and were pretty beat. We wanted to stay up and get our bodies used to the new time so we watched tv for a bit and went to bed. As Caviglia noted it is weird and strangely entertaining to watch tv in a different language. I think the most entertaining part are the ads, they are so different from what we have at home.

I'll leave it here for now, Caviglia is at her conference tomorrow so I will do some more posts about our first day in Japan and about my day. Hopefully that will get us all caught up and I can do posts as they happen.