mokudekiru

I’m in Japan! After one day in Nippon, I look like this (thanks, Japanese humidity):

As soon as I stepped off the plane I felt that wonderful Japanese humidity that I have longed for all year. jk.

So here’s the story: Pack until 3:30 am on Monday night/Tuesday morning. Go to our favorite local airport the next morning (Thanks to those of you who were there to send me off, it was definitely the most dramatic sendoff I have ever received… also the only one, but whatever!) Fly on the plane on Tuesday morning… fast forward about 16 hours or whatever, and end up in Narita. Then we are going through customs and they start questioning my dad, and asking me, “is he with you?”… and then they take us into a room and question us. Who are we and why are we here? Why is he only staying a week and why am I staying a year? Why are we going to Kobe in several days?? And then some questions he asked me in Japanese, like, “Is your dad here just because he’s worrying about you,” which I thought I didn’t understand, since it’s such a weird question, but then he said it in English, and that was it. Or, “does your dad go with you everywhere?” Eventually they gave up and decided we weren’t threats, I suppose, cuz we’re IN.

Then a bus later we are at Shinjuku station, and then eventually we wind up at our hotel, which is in none other than Shinjuku. My grandpa is also here, not because he is worried about me either, but because he was born in Kobe.

Here is my dad and Grandpa at the hotel. Note the escalator on the right, it changes which direction it goes based on the time of day. Last night it was going up (helpful for luggage) and this morning it was going down (helpful for laziness). There are stairs too in case you want to go the opposite direction though, you don’t have to swim against the escalator current.

Shinjuku looks kind of like this (actually exactly like this):

and this (better pictures to come when I haven’t been awake for 24+ hours):

After this, it was Wednesday, 7pm (or Wednesday morning, 5 am at home), so we just went to our hotel room, and I spent like two hours taking a shower and getting ready to sleep due to me not being able to find which toiletries I needed. My dad was/is really sick and kept wanting to sleep so I had to try to do this really quietly. He pretty much made me go to sleep at 9 pm, but I did successfully sleep until 8 am, so at least now I will be on a semi-normal schedule. Hotel pictures in next post.

I finally have this thing set up — nothing of interest to read today of course, but tomorrow I depart for Japan. Ideally this blog will be exciting enough that people other than my immediate family will look at it every so often. Armed with technology, I will broadcast to you from the future (well… time-zone-wise anyway). Yeah yeah it’s not really August 15.

testing testing