intro: to start off with, i'm doing what i did for my last trip to japan 2 years ago. i did not have internet access on a regular basis and when i did, i did not have time to blog about my trip. i carried with me a small notebook and kept notes about my travels. i made very brief entries for each day and when i returned from my trip, i entered the notes into the blog and expanded upon them to form whole (but perhaps not complete) sentences. this current trip was longer and i did much more so my head is spinning from writing out the notes from just the first week. while my head is still in memory mode for the first week, i do not want to enter the notes for the second week of the trip and blur all my memories together.

vegan flight food

we arrived in japan today on the second of october but this entry really starts yesterday as that was the day we took off from los angeles. our plane left at 1:45pm. i flew with twiddle thumbs and her older sister. my mom also flew but on a different airline/flight about 30 minutes before us. i brought a book with me but i never read it as there were many films being shown that i have not seen. i watched "cars" (now i have seen all of the pixar feature films and i'm glad i didn't pay money to see this one in theaters, even at the cheap theater!), ate lunch, watched "an inconvenient truth" (i could say a lot about this film but a couple words from a song in the south park movie come to mind: "we're pretty fucked"), then "click" (another adam sandler chuckler), they served snacks (it looks like it's always a sandwich for vegetarians on flights to japan), watched "the birds" (such a classic, very hard to resist watching it) as they gave me the wrong dinner (it had chicken in it, but the sticker was crossed off and written over to read "VGML") so i exchanged (gave) the main dish with twiddle thumbs's sister who couldn't eat her ravioli as she doesn't eat beef. the stewardess apologized for the non-vegetarian meal mixup, gave me extra vegetables, and came back to collect my food to write a report. she was puzzled as to why she collected beef ravioli from me! i told her i gave my food to my neighbor and the puzzled look disappeared a bit, hehehe.

we arrived at 1:05am pacific standard time, 5:05pm local japan time (same monday, october 2nd for both time zones). we taxi-ed in the air for about 20-30 minutes before we landed and it took about 15 minutes to exit the plane. it didn't take too long for me in the japanese immigration line. i didn't speak a word, just slid my passport over to the official. he looked at me and the passport then let me go. i was waiting for the scrutinizing look and some comment about me really being japanese or not even though that's never happened before. i went to get all of our baggage and then waited for the girls to finish with the foreign immigration line. we then met up with my mother and exchanged our jr rail pass receipts to get the actual passes (they look much nicer now than the one i got 9 years ago).

using our passes, we took the narita express at 6:49pm, arrived at tokyo station 1 hour later, then transferred to the yamanote line (tokyo loop line) and got off a couple stations away (10 minutes?) at ueno station. we walked to our hotel, hotel fukuya, which was quite close but i don't think foreigners who can't read japanese would be able to find it as easily as we did as the sign out in front for you to notice that the entrance is down a little street (alley is more appropriate?) is in japanese only. i only mention this because every place we are staying at, i booked ahead of time in america and i read about each on their own websites in english. perhaps if i searched for places in japanese i would've got a better deal or knew all the terms/conditions (we'll get to that later this post and later in the trip!) but it would've taken me much longer as i'm a pretty crappy reader. (again, i am a basic conversationalist. my japanese mind is still a child and i am trying to make it grow up. it's hard to do when you don't use japanese everyday in your life and you don't live in japan.) so we check-in and it's much more expensive than i thought it would be. ok, maybe not expensive but it's blowing the budget i had prepared. online the rooms were 13,000yen each (up to 4 people) but now i see that that is the price for 2 people. we paid 6500yen per person, per night which is twice what i budgeted for tokyo. this was a shock to the system for the first night but we're tired and it's sprinkling so what'cha gonna do? (later on we realize the other rooms are not being used and since the price is the same, we should've booked 2 rooms so that we would have 2 bathrooms for all 4 of us.)

our japanese style hotel room

all of us walk across the street in search of a phone so twiddle thumbs's sister can call her husband and some food because some of us are hungry. there really aren't many restaurants open as far as we can tell and we don't want to wander around because it is sprinkling. we go into a narrow 2 story ramen place and sit upstairs. twiddle thumbs and i both order the vegetable ramen. gross! pork base soup! looks like the whole trip will be vegetarian and not vegan. i was expecting that but it's a shock to the system. can't we do vegetarian tomorrow? right now i just want warm, comfortable vegan food. i feel like indiana jones in the small indian village and force myself to eat most of it and twiddle thumbs to eat some of it. later on i read my notes about dining vegetarian in japan and notice the remark that all ramen is made with pork broth so i should stick to udon and soba. we go to the nearby convenience store and buy some food for breakfast tomorrow and a telephone card for twiddle thumbs's sister. for some reason, we weren't able to make an international call from the public phone that can make international calls (we tried all three long distance carriers) but we were able to make the call from the hotel room.

i am including my expenses so that others wishing to visit japan can see how much a trip may cost. people think japan is really expensive and it can be, i am not denying that at all. but it is possible to see japan on a budget. it also doesn't hurt to know some japanese language/customs and local people and stay with them for free!

today's expenses in yen:
¥6500 hotel
¥630 dinner
¥432 water/tomorrow's breakfast

(the simplest way to convert this to american dollars is to treat it as the full dollars and cents written without a decimal point so just add it back in. for example, hotel becomes $65.00. the exchange rate varies and some places may charge a transaction fee so this method works well for quick estimations. the actual cost in american dollars is a little less. using the hotel as an example again, it could be $57~$60. by the way, we didn't exchange our money at LAX because the exchange rate was shit! $1=¥94. forget it!!! we each exchanged about $300 at narita airport at the rate of $1=¥115. for the rest of the trip we will withdraw at postal atms or citibank whenever we need cash.)