The Tyranny of Distance

I <3 Japan

I don’t know if anyone still reads the blog, since I haven’t gotten any comments in a long time, but here goes the second to last post just in case there is someone out there! If there are people still reading, I apologize for being such a slacker when it comes to posting pictures. It is impossible on the ship since Internet is horribly slow and terribly expensive, and I haven’t had my computer out in port anytime recently to actually upload them up onto Flickr. If interested, I will be sure to show anyone the 1,000+ pictures I currently have when I come home in the next few weeks!


Japan: Day 1

Like I have done at almost every port so far, I woke up extremely early to watch the sun rise as we pulled into Kobe, Japan. Unfortunately, it was rainy, cold, and cloudy, so I ended up going back to sleep for a while. Japan is really weird when it comes to letting people into the country. The day before we arrived, we had to have our temperatures taken to make sure we weren’t sick. Then the morning we arrived we had to walk past this “thermoscan” machine that read our body temperature just to make sure. SAS advised that if we did have a little fever to take Tylenol and stand outside in the cold for a few minutes before having your temperature checked, because people would literally be quarantined if they had even a slight fever. Contrary to what the name suggests, the thermoscan wasn’t actually awesome as I was predicting, and in fact was horribly anticlimactic.
The ship was given the most amazing welcome upon arriving in Kobe. Not only was there a fire-boat helping us into the harbor which sprayed our water in a little water show and a band out by the port while we actually pulled in, but we had a whole welcome reception! The Kobe tourism board organized a whole ordeal, including an amazing percussion performance!
After the ship was cleared by customs, I went to walk around Kobe for the day with a few friends. We had no plan for the morning so we just wandered. The first thing I noticed was that although the city was packed with people, the streets were almost silent. I could talk at a normal volume, and even that was almost too loud. Everyone had somewhere to be and they were being courteous while getting there, something I have never experienced before. I found some crazy/awesome stores such as one which just had many many crane machines, each with crazy crazy prizes (honestly, how can someone expect to win a playstation 3 from a crane machine?!) After walking around for a few hours we went back to the ship for a welcome reception with Japanese students.
All of the other welcome receptions (Puerto Rico, India, & Malaysia) were visits to other universities, but the one in Kobe was held on the MV Explorer. There were about 70 Japanese students present from a few universities in the area. There was a little program, which involved SAS students and Japanese students performing for each other. Afterwards we were given some time to mingle with the students while they taught us how to do Japanese calligraphy and origami. I gave a few students a brief tour of the ship, which was fun (albeit slightly difficult considering the language barrier, seeing as only one of the students I walked around with spoke limited English). A few of the students I met offered to take my friends and me out for Karaoke later that night, which we were thrilled about!
After a brief dinner on the ship, we went out to meet the two Japanese girls who we met at the welcome reception. We ended up going to this huge karaoke bar in the center of Kobe. We were given our own little room and sang karaoke for about two hours! It was so incredibly fun and so incredibly Japanese! According to our new friends, they did karaoke pretty often. There was a nice combination of Japanese pop songs, bad American songs, and some awesome classic rock such as Bon Jovi and Journey! After karaoke our Japanese friends gave us all little presents (candy and packs of chopsticks) which was so incredibly nice!
On the metro ride back to the ship we ended up talking to really nice old businessmen, which was a really cool experience. Even in America I couldn’t have started a conversation with random people on the train, and there we speak the same language! People in Japan are truly the nicest, friendliest people I have ever met!


Japan: Day 2

I had to wake up at 5:30am on Thursday to get ready for my SAS trip to Hiroshima that left at 6am!!! To take the bullet train there it would have cost over $200, but through this trip it was half the price (the catch: a five-hour bus ride both ways!) There were about 40 people on the trip including students and about six professors. On the way to Hiroshima, we stopped at two different rest-stops for bathroom/food breaks, Unlike most in America, these rest stops were extremely nice! Walking through them was an experience all in itself.
After a few rest stops and a few mini-naps we finally arrived in Hiroshima at around 11am. Our first stop was the A-Bomb Dome, which is one of the few buildings that partially survived the atomic bomb explosion on August 6, 1945. Our guide explained that since the building was almost directly under the explosion, it somehow avoided a majority of the energy created by the A-Bomb. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and has since been slightly renovated to ensure that it remains stable, but otherwise it is just as it was after the morning of the bomb,
Next we went to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, which truly was the best museum/memorial I have ever been to. I cannot even explain some of the images I saw. Mushroom clouds, burned clothes, pictures of melted skin, and images of shadows that were burned into the ground. There was a pocket watch, which died at exactly 8:15am, the same exact moment the bomb exploded. Even though there were such horrible images and tales of atrocious acts committed by the U.S. government, I surprisingly did not leave the museum feeling completely depressed and overwhelmed. The museum had an incredibly positive message of peace, of ridding the world of nuclear weapons forever. Hiroshima has overcome the most devastating tragedy I could ever imagine; yet they have overcome and are now urging everyone who visits to work to prevent such an unimaginably horrible event from happening again. I left the museum not feeling paralyzed by my emotions as I predicted; rather, I left feeling motivated to continue working for peace and the betterment of life for everyone.
After the museum we went to Shukkeien Garden, which is a beautiful little garden not far away. The garden was originally built in 1620 but the A-Bomb destroyed it; only one tree survived and it is there to this day. Since then, the city has restored the garden to its condition prior to the bomb. Visiting the garden was a perfect way to follow up the museum. I was still overwhelmed by what I saw and the garden was a beautiful, peaceful place for me to think over everything. Not only that, I saw the garden as a testament to the city of Hiroshima and their ability to overcome in the face of absolute despair. Only one tree survived the bomb blast, which is still there to this day. Everything else has been replanted, just as the city had to rebuild itself, and it is now just as beautiful as it was before.
After visiting Shukkeien Garden we got back on the bus for another five-hour ride back to the ship. We stopped at two rest stops again, but this time we got dinner at the second. Instead of sitting at a table and having a waiter or waitress take our order, we walked up to these machines and pushed a button that corresponded with the dish we wanted, and put money in to pay. Then a ticket would come out, which we would take to the food counter. There they would take our ticket and put together our meal. A pretty crazy yet efficient way to serve food! I ordered udon noodles, which were so good! After dinner we had our last stretch of bus ride before finally reaching the ship, where I quickly fell asleep!


Japan: Day 3

I took an hour-long train ride from Kobe to Kyoto with my roommate Kyle and a few other friends. I had heard that Kyoto was the prettiest city in Japan, filled with ridiculously old temples and beautiful gardens. It is also home to eleven UNESCO World Heritage sites, so I was pretty excited to see some interesting places. We started off by walking to one garden and two temples that were within walking distance of the Kyoto train station. We didn’t walk into the garden but just looked briefly from the outside. The first temple was under construction, but we were able to walk through the second temple, which was nice. After these first few stops we wandered around for a while looking for lunch. We eventually found a place where I had ridiculously delicious eel!
After lunch we took a train ride to the southwest part of Kyoto where there were supposedly temples and gardens all around. We found this one place that had four major temples in one area, so we walked around there for a few hours. They were all beautiful, but by the end we were pretty templed-out, since they are all very similar architecturally. We then walked a while to Gian, an old district in the city. On the way we found this beautiful massive shrine that we walked around in for a little while. The main purpose for walking through Gian was to go “geisha hunting” as we described it, since Kyle was set on finding at least one Geisha while in Kyoto (since they supposedly can only be found in Kyoto and very small parts of Tokyo. Geisha supposedly only come out at dusk, so we were right on time and were hoping to see at least one! We walked around for a while with no success, but after we turned a random corner we ended up seeing at least five geisha inside three minutes!
Following a successful geisha hunt (exclaimer: no geisha were hurt in the geisha hunt) we finally got down to downtown Kyoto and went to find dinner in this crazy outside/indoor mall thingey that seemed like it went down this one road forever. After dinner we found a Baskin Robins and got ice cream. They had all kinds of different flavors like green tea and cherry blossom ice cream! (the prior was surprisingly bad, the latter surprisingly good) We then walked around this crazy arcade which was even crazier than I imagined! DDR, pachinko, and other wild things filled a seven-story arcade! After walking around the city for a few hours we decided to try to find a place to sleep. We ended up at a manga café (manga are Japanese graphic novels, and these cafes have massive libraries of manga and tons of computers. They have private rooms that can be rented out for the night, with a cushioned floor and your own computer and TV to use for the night. They also have free drinks, soft serve ice cream, and showers to use. They are ridiculously awesome!) I split a room with Mark, so we only had to pay about $15 each for a place to stay for the night and unlimited internet, even though we barely used the computer since we were so exhausted from a day of walking around.


Japan: Day 4

Saturday was probably the busiest/craziest day of my entire life! We woke up in the manga café and went to get breakfast at a little pastry shop. We then went to Nijo-Jo castle, which is a few hundred years old. The castle was beautiful and had a great garden on the outside. The coolest part was the floors, which were called nightingale floors. They were designed to squeak whenever they were walked on to inform people if someone was trying to sneak in. We could have easily spent a week around Kyoto looking at all of the temples, shrines, and gardens but we decided we saw a good amount already and wanted to see some other cities.
We took a train to Nara, which was only about ½ an hour away. Nara is an amazing city because they have deer walking around everywhere! Literally everywhere! We walked to the main park in the city and you could walk up to a group of ten deer easily. They are so used to humans that you can just walk right up to them and pet them, which we did a lot of. It was so cool! Never did I ever expect to actually pet a deer, let alone pet numerous deer inside a few minutes. You could buy food to feed them, which we didn’t do, but we saw plenty of people feeding them. One deer walked right up to a small boy and started eating chips right out of a bag in his hand! The other main attraction in Nara besides the deer was a massive Buddha statue, which was so incredible/beautiful/huge! After walking around the Buddha statue for a while we visited a few other temples in the area. One was a long hike up a hill, but was well worth it because you could see all of Nara in the distance, and the mountain range that was behind that.
The original plan was to head back to the ship Saturday night after Kyoto and Nara, but Kyle and I really wanted to stay in a capsule hotel, and we couldn’t find any outside of Osaka. Osaka was on the way back to Kobe, so we decided to head to Osaka for the night. We took a train ride there and walked around to find the capsule hotel that we read about in our guidebook. We finally found the hotel, which was crazy! Capsule hotels are only for men, and were created to be a cheap place for businessmen to crash for the night. They are literally rows upon rows of these tiny pods, which could fit a single person. The door looks like the door to a washing machine, and when you climb in it is a mattress and a TV above. There really is no room to sit up, let alone move around in at all. Laying in one, I’m assuming, is similar to one lying in a spacious coffin (minus the creepiness). After checking into the hotel we went back out to find some dinner. After meeting up with some friends and walking around for a horribly long time, we finally found somewhere to eat. Following dinner we walked around Osaka, which is supposedly similar to Tokyo at night. At around 11:30pm we decided to head back to the capsule hotel and get to bed. The hotel had robes for us, so we wore they awesome Japanese robes to bed. Sleeping in the pod was surprisingly awesome and incredibly comfortable! It was truly one of the most odd experiences of my life but it was great and so much fun! Best of all, it was ridiculously cheap to sleep there for the night. The hotel offered a sauna and Thai massages, but we opted out of those options for many reasons. I crashed pretty quickly since it was the longest day ever! I woke up in a manga café, traveled through three completely different cities in Japan, and fell asleep in a capsule. That’s a pretty successful day if I do say so myself!


Japan: Day 5

I haven’t slept as well as I did in the capsule in the longest time! When I woke I just started laughing at how silly/awesome it was. It was surprisingly incredibly comfortable and not weird at all! We got breakfast at this amazing café with delicious pastries before catching a train back to Kobe. We spent the rest of the day walking around Kobe and just hanging out. We were all ridiculously exhausted from the few days before and didn’t have enough energy to do much else. I got sushi for dinner, since I had yet to eat sushi in Japan up until then. Usually in the States I am pretty cautious about the sushi I eat, and rarely do I try raw or odd things. Here I went all out and tried almost everything they brought, and mostly things were pretty delicious! After dinner we went to this place that had crazy ice cream desserts. I split this almost two-foot tall tower of ice cream with a few people, which was so delicious!
I was so incredibly sad to leave Japan. Not only was it easily my favorite port (and probably my favorite country in the entire world now) but it was also our last real port. All we have left is a few hours in Hawaii and then we will be home. Although I can’t wait to get home, this trip is coming to an end way too quickly and it is mind-boggling to look back at everything I have seen/done. Puerto Rico seems like years ago, yet it was barely three months ago. We have over a week of sailing to Hawaii, one day in Hawaii, and then about a week sailing to San Diego. Supposedly the seas are going to be really rough from here on in, so I will likely get sea sick over the next two weeks ☹

posted by eric @ 5:18 PM