Japan!

If you think that our customs check in the United States is strict, then go visit Japan. After filling out stacks of visa papers, our entire ship had to get off in the morning and one-by-one get finger printed, face-to-face checked, and searched. After a couple of hours of waiting in long lines, we finally left the port and took a quick train to the main section of Kobe. Kobe is a beautiful Mecca of sky scrapers and reminded me of any big city back on the United States. It was extremely clean, easy to get around, and everyone was so friendly. First, a group of us decided to go to a sake factory and see how sake was made. We toured a museum that showed the process of fermenting sake from rice and at the end of the tour we got to try different kinds of cold sake. It was pretty neat to see and we got to drink a lot of free sake, so all-in-all pretty successful!

After Sake-ing, we headed to the bay to find a fun restaurant to get lunch/dinner. Naturally, everyone wanted some good quality Kobe beef, but after attempting a couple of Kobe restaurants that charged about $70 for a decent sized Kobe beef steak, we decided to find a restaurant that was a little more our budget and get normal, cheaper steaks. We ended up at a little saloon restaurant that had U.S. license plates all over the walls. The service was impeccable! We had a little button at our table and anytime we needed something, our waitress was there in a flash. She was really cute and didn’t really understand English, so we had a fun time pointing at all of the things we wanted. Once our meal was finished, we all paid and discovered that the Japanese do NOT accept any sort of tip. The tax is included in the meal itself and the prices are adjusted to have the tip included as well. The Japanese believe that their service is so good that they do not need a customer to leave an extra tip to insure the quality. We walked around the bay area after lunch for a while and found ourselves at a little carnival. We went on the Ferris wheel that overlooked downtown Kobe and the port and we rode on little mechanical pandas! Then we shopped at some of the little trolley stores and headed back to the ship to get ready for the night.

Some people decided to go to a nightclub in Osaka, but it was a 20 minute train ride away and the last train back to our port was at 12:30am, so a bunch of us ended up staying in Kobe and going out to a club there. We ended up going to an all you can drink for $15 USD nightclub that was pretty cool. It was a little crowded with SAS kids and the bar was almost impossible to get to due to everyone trying to get all of the drinks they could handle at once. We danced away the night and headed back to the ship in the early morning to get some sleep before we headed to Tokyo.

This morning we all got up to pack our bags and head on a bullet train to Tokyo. We got a little lost with all of the changing of trains that we ended up getting to the bullet train with little time to get on our train. We later realized that there were several trains going to Tokyo throughout the day, so we simply caught the next one that left about 20 minutes after the one we missed. Ali, Amanda, and I settled into our seats for our 2 and a half hour train ride to Tokyo. We arrived around 1:30 and made it our first priority to find a hotel. We went to a travel desk and found a hotel in the Shibuya district, which is the Times Square area of Tokyo. We stayed in the Tokyu Inn that was right across the street from the main train station, and right in the center of the square. Tokyo is absolutely huge and it has 30 different districts. We got to witness the busiest cross walk in the world. It had four different cross sections…your typical square cross walk that creates a box connecting the traffic lights, and then it also had cross walks that made an X across the street and attached to about three other streets to create the largest intersection I have ever seen! Every time the light changed for the cross-walks, a sea of business suites, black hair, and a couple random bright colored outfits worn by the tourists filled the pavement and for a good 10 minutes, that is all you could see. We found our hotel right away and set our stuff down and headed out to find a place to get lunch. We ended up at a little restaurant where we had mini hibachi grills on our table. The waiter brought our food out cold and helped us cook it on our table. Then we got little utensils that looked like mini-spatulas, and shoveled our food off of the heated surface and ate it.