Japan Trippin!

Man, I suck at this updating thing. A week after my trip and I'm finally getting around to posting something. Ok, well, here goes:

So last weekend was the Chuseok holiday in Korea, basically one of the two biggest in the country. In honor of such a momentous holiday, I, along with 3 of my fellow teachers, decided to celebrate by getting the hell out of this country! We jumped a plane to Tokyo, and wacky adventures ensued. These are their stories.

Unfortunately, us Saturday class people still had to teach. That's right, we teach classes on Saturday! But luckily, we pushed them to earlier in the day; the downside was that we had to teach at 9 in the morning. But afterwards, we jumped into a cab and shot right on over to the airport! A short flight overseas (2 hours, about), and Japan met us in all our glory. Well, not Tokyo though; the airport is an hour and a half train ride outside of the city, so we took a little while to get there. But Japan had to be eased into our glory.

Now, for unknown reasons to me today, the decision was made not to have a hotel room the first night. We had an area that we wanted to stay in (Shinjuku, western part of the city), but somehow we ended up without specific accommodations. That was ok, though; we got off the train and made our way to one of the two hotels we narrowed it down to. Wait, the hotel rooms are like $150 more than the online prices?!? Forget that! We had two choices: bite the bullet and pay extra or find a new hotel. Or wait, maybe we had a third: stay up all night! Yep, that's right, we reserved our hotels for the rest of the time there, then dropped off our bags and hit the streets for what would soon be the most painful night of our lives. We went out to a club/bar area in Rappungi, which was full of foreigners, and checked out a few places. Eventually, by the early morning hours, we decided it would be a solid idea to go to the Tsukiji Fish Market so we could eat sushi as soon as it opened at 5. So we walked about half the length of the city to get there. Now, we all got up early, but the others essentially stayed up all the night before as well, and I'm a wuss when it comes to sleep deprivation. So we got to the market with time to spare and found a diner to sit in and rest (and, for some, sleep). Turns out, the fish market was closed on Sundays, and it was a holiday weekend besides, so no market for us, though we did still eat sushi there. We then headed over the the Imperial Palace, which was nice from afar, though that's as far as we got since we couldn't get past the gate to see it. We then attempted (unsuccessfully) to find places to sleep until our hotel rooms opened up, settling finally on the hotel lobby.

A lot of the time there was spent just walking around people-watching and checking everything out. Tokyo has a cool vibe; it's a huge city with lots of flashy lights. Our general rule was to go towards the shiniest areas, which worked out pretty well. Everything feels more relaxed there than Korea. The people there are different from Korea as well; everyone's so fashionable and has their own individual style versus here where they all kinda dress the same. And people are so polite in comparison! Walking down the street, you don't have to duck and dodge people, shouldering old ladies out of the way. It was also oddly quiet in comparison, even though it was tons busier in parts. I have to say, I kind of wish I went to Japan for the atmosphere alone, but Korea for the actual work is more worthwhile: better pay, more jobs, etc. And the food! Oh lordy, we had some good food: sushi every day, all fresh and not that frozen tuna crap. Tonkatsu, yakiudon, we even went to a really nice dim sum place and splurged a bit. Good times.

We also did a fair bit of shopping. Dan and I are of course huge nerds, so we hit up the manga places and arcades. He had been looking to play Street Fighter 4 since it's only in Japan, so naturally that was one of the first things we did. They had all kinds of fun, goofy games to play there and I spent many a yen. The manga places were overwhelming and I really didn't know where to start, but ended up buying a few odd things here and there. And of course lots of little toys; I love the Japanese capsule machines for all the cutsy and just plain awesome things you can get out of them, including a bunch of manga-looking Marvel superheroes! As a side note, in Japan 100 and 500 yen (about $1 and $5) are in coin form, so you don't really keep track of them quite as well as you probably should. But also, since it was so fashionable and such, I even went out to a few clothing places and picked up some stuff. I am a consumer whore!

Anyways, that's about it in a nutshell. We got to the airport and our plane ended up being delayed for 2 1/2 hours, which meant we were late for class, but ah well. After a weekend like that, class was the least of my worries. Got lots of fun souvenirs and trinkets for everyone, which will be sent out post haste-esque!

And now, the pics.