日本へようこそ
Nippon e yōkoso!!
I've been debating whether or not I really want to post anything here regarding our honeymoon, I just decided what the hell. If people read it, they read it, if they don't they don't. I have a couple of friends here who I know will appreciate the posts anyways so why not. After making this very conscious decision, I then thought about how to deliver everything. I could break it down by days, but we were gone for 3 weeks, so that's tons of writing and tons of posts and I don't think I have the energy nor the motivation to do that. I could break it down by cities, fewer posts, but much longer posts so there's still a lot of typing. Or, I could combine the two and do cities, but for cities that had a ton of stuff happening, I could break it down into days. I'm hoping I'll have somewhere around 7-10 posts (considering 3 weeks in 5 cities, I think it's pretty good). Let's see if I'm able to keep up with it. I was smart enough to keep a diary while traveling, not trusting to remember every spectacular detail, and that was good thinking too; because, now being home for nearly a month, it seems like it was just a distant dream that we were in some of my favorite cities in the world.
The morning of October 21st was spent in a frenzy of running around, last minute packing, trying to make the house somewhat presentable since Eero's younger brother would be staying there while we were gone, checking and double checking for our Japan Rail Pass, passports, wallets, etc all before Eero's dad came to pick us up at 3pm. Stupidly smart me decided that doing night shifts right before we leave would put me on Japanese time (6 hours ahead of Finrand), and while it worked for the most part, I was so physically and mentally exhausted I wondered how I would be able to do anything over there on that side of the world. I'm the one who would have to do most of the navigating and communicating since I speak Japanese as well as speak and read Korean. I could barely think in English much less Finnish, Japanese, or Korean. Thank God for a 9 hour flight where I could get some sleep.
Flying over that Russian airspace, man. Would not want to be outside.
Japanese Alps as we were starting to make our decent
We arrived in Nagoya at 9am October 22nd. The flight was nice, but the dinner sucked major. Eero being the friggen carnivore that he is ordered the chicken dinner though I told him it's probably not going to be that good. I ordered the pasta and true enough to my word, Eero didn't like the chicken, so I being the loving, doting wife gave him my pasta and managed to eat at least the side dishes. I got some sleep on the plane, but again, in true Eero fashion, he didn't listen to me and didn't sleep at all.
Our arrival in Nagoya was more or less smooth. Of course I got flagged at customs and they had to look through my bags. Still wanna say racial profiling doesn't exist? A Black woman with a headwrap, of course she's a terrorist. Anyways, there's a train that goes directly from the airport to the Nagoya train station in the city, but it was somehow difficult to navigate as everything was in Kanji or katagana. Thank God for my language skills so I was able to ask from which track our train left to get to the city and from there it was smooth sailing, somewhat. It took some time to navigate around the train station (Japanese train stations are really something to behold. We found the office to exchange our Rail Passes, got a ticket for the shinkansen (bullet) train to Tokyo and started off on our adventure.
Random subway picture in Nagoya
I can't really say much about our train ride from Nagoya to Tokyo. It was about 2-2.5 hours but I slept literally the entire way. At least Tokyo was the final stop, we arrived around 1pm. Navigating around Tokyo was much easier than Nagoya as there was more English to be seen and we found our hotel in no time. The location was really prime, in Shin Okubo (one stop after Shinjuku on the JR Yamanote line) and there were tons of things to do and stuff to see even in just our neighborhood. Our hotel was really super cute, a traditional ryokan with futons, tatami mats and a Japanese style bath as well. The toilet seat was even heated. The staff was superbly friendly and even carried our luggage up the 3 flights of stairs to our room.
I thought it was so cute how they put an origami crane on our towels
Pretty tatami mats
We rested up a bit (well Eero slept really long since he didn't sleep at all on the plane or train ugh so we didn't manage to do very much our first day. I was a bit disappointed because we had planned to spend about 3 days in Tokyo and there were tons of things I wanted to do. We settled on this first night to eat somewhere and walk around the neighborhood. The hotel staff recommended a place called Watami which is sorta like a drinking restaurant. I don't know how to really describe it in English. Anyways, you have your own private booth with a curtain and there's a bell you ring whenever you want to order. It's really efficient and the staff was really great helping us with ordering (since neither of us could really read and while there was an English menu, it was still difficult to decide what we wanted). The pan-fried dumplings were out of this world as well as the breaded tuna (which was still raw in the middle - yum), and salmon nigiri. And yes, I did drink a lot XDD. Unfortunately, my camera died and my cellphone takes crappy pictures so that was it for the night.
:p---
It became pitch black around 7pm, which sort of surprised me, but considering the time of year, is not so abnormal. Even in Texas in the Fall it starts to get dark between 6 and 7. We walked around the hotel area for some time, even discovering a small Korean area but decided against spending time there and headed back to the hotel some hours later. We watched some anime that I don't know the name of, and even saw Kuroko no Basuke. We were somewhat able to follow along, but changed the channel so we wouldn't spoil ourselves XDD. Sometime around 11pm or so we turned in for the night on our soft futons, dreaming about going to Akihabara the next day.
I've been debating whether or not I really want to post anything here regarding our honeymoon, I just decided what the hell. If people read it, they read it, if they don't they don't. I have a couple of friends here who I know will appreciate the posts anyways so why not. After making this very conscious decision, I then thought about how to deliver everything. I could break it down by days, but we were gone for 3 weeks, so that's tons of writing and tons of posts and I don't think I have the energy nor the motivation to do that. I could break it down by cities, fewer posts, but much longer posts so there's still a lot of typing. Or, I could combine the two and do cities, but for cities that had a ton of stuff happening, I could break it down into days. I'm hoping I'll have somewhere around 7-10 posts (considering 3 weeks in 5 cities, I think it's pretty good). Let's see if I'm able to keep up with it. I was smart enough to keep a diary while traveling, not trusting to remember every spectacular detail, and that was good thinking too; because, now being home for nearly a month, it seems like it was just a distant dream that we were in some of my favorite cities in the world.
The morning of October 21st was spent in a frenzy of running around, last minute packing, trying to make the house somewhat presentable since Eero's younger brother would be staying there while we were gone, checking and double checking for our Japan Rail Pass, passports, wallets, etc all before Eero's dad came to pick us up at 3pm. Stupidly smart me decided that doing night shifts right before we leave would put me on Japanese time (6 hours ahead of Finrand), and while it worked for the most part, I was so physically and mentally exhausted I wondered how I would be able to do anything over there on that side of the world. I'm the one who would have to do most of the navigating and communicating since I speak Japanese as well as speak and read Korean. I could barely think in English much less Finnish, Japanese, or Korean. Thank God for a 9 hour flight where I could get some sleep.
Flying over that Russian airspace, man. Would not want to be outside.
Japanese Alps as we were starting to make our decent
We arrived in Nagoya at 9am October 22nd. The flight was nice, but the dinner sucked major. Eero being the friggen carnivore that he is ordered the chicken dinner though I told him it's probably not going to be that good. I ordered the pasta and true enough to my word, Eero didn't like the chicken, so I being the loving, doting wife gave him my pasta and managed to eat at least the side dishes. I got some sleep on the plane, but again, in true Eero fashion, he didn't listen to me and didn't sleep at all.
Our arrival in Nagoya was more or less smooth. Of course I got flagged at customs and they had to look through my bags. Still wanna say racial profiling doesn't exist? A Black woman with a headwrap, of course she's a terrorist. Anyways, there's a train that goes directly from the airport to the Nagoya train station in the city, but it was somehow difficult to navigate as everything was in Kanji or katagana. Thank God for my language skills so I was able to ask from which track our train left to get to the city and from there it was smooth sailing, somewhat. It took some time to navigate around the train station (Japanese train stations are really something to behold. We found the office to exchange our Rail Passes, got a ticket for the shinkansen (bullet) train to Tokyo and started off on our adventure.
Random subway picture in Nagoya
I can't really say much about our train ride from Nagoya to Tokyo. It was about 2-2.5 hours but I slept literally the entire way. At least Tokyo was the final stop, we arrived around 1pm. Navigating around Tokyo was much easier than Nagoya as there was more English to be seen and we found our hotel in no time. The location was really prime, in Shin Okubo (one stop after Shinjuku on the JR Yamanote line) and there were tons of things to do and stuff to see even in just our neighborhood. Our hotel was really super cute, a traditional ryokan with futons, tatami mats and a Japanese style bath as well. The toilet seat was even heated. The staff was superbly friendly and even carried our luggage up the 3 flights of stairs to our room.
I thought it was so cute how they put an origami crane on our towels
Pretty tatami mats
We rested up a bit (well Eero slept really long since he didn't sleep at all on the plane or train ugh so we didn't manage to do very much our first day. I was a bit disappointed because we had planned to spend about 3 days in Tokyo and there were tons of things I wanted to do. We settled on this first night to eat somewhere and walk around the neighborhood. The hotel staff recommended a place called Watami which is sorta like a drinking restaurant. I don't know how to really describe it in English. Anyways, you have your own private booth with a curtain and there's a bell you ring whenever you want to order. It's really efficient and the staff was really great helping us with ordering (since neither of us could really read and while there was an English menu, it was still difficult to decide what we wanted). The pan-fried dumplings were out of this world as well as the breaded tuna (which was still raw in the middle - yum), and salmon nigiri. And yes, I did drink a lot XDD. Unfortunately, my camera died and my cellphone takes crappy pictures so that was it for the night.
:p---
It became pitch black around 7pm, which sort of surprised me, but considering the time of year, is not so abnormal. Even in Texas in the Fall it starts to get dark between 6 and 7. We walked around the hotel area for some time, even discovering a small Korean area but decided against spending time there and headed back to the hotel some hours later. We watched some anime that I don't know the name of, and even saw Kuroko no Basuke. We were somewhat able to follow along, but changed the channel so we wouldn't spoil ourselves XDD. Sometime around 11pm or so we turned in for the night on our soft futons, dreaming about going to Akihabara the next day.