First Impressions of Japan

First impressions of Japan:

The flight staff were very friendly, a great bunch of nice people to introduce foreigners to their country. There were a few checkpoints to make sure our flight was not bringing in swine flu, but these were done very politely.

Japanese snacks are very different than the usual snacks in America. They come in smaller sizes and are pretty expensive. I once ate a cookie that was coated in salt - not good! I also bought a donut and I thought it would be jelly-filled, but after a couple of bites I found out the filling was rice and curry, which was an awful trick for my mind. It turns out reading can be more important than just looking and picking. Fruits and vegetables are a little more expensive since many are imported. Many restaurants are foreigner-friendly despite the language barrier. For instance, there are many pictures of meals to point at as well as the Japanese art of real-looking fake plastic food for window-shoppers.


Taken from the train out of the airport, this picture shows one of the many rice fields on the way to our apartment. Japan has little land that is available for farming, so where there is agriculture there is super-productivity. On the edges, you'll see this plot is surrounded by woods on the left and train tracks and a parking lot to the front and right.







Tokyo train station



The toilets have a faucet in the back, so when you flush it turns the sink on.












Funky-looking vegetation. This was taken outside of the Imperial Palace.

















The entrance to the temples in Asakusa. Some 30 million people a year pass through here.

Pagoda

The difference between a temple and a shrine, from my understanding, is that a temple honors a god while a shrine honors ancestry. It is sometimes hard to tell the architectural/physical difference between the two.

The streets can be crazy for a foreigner. They are usually less noisy, particularly the streets near apartments which is odd due to the large population, but when walking you've got to pay attention to the flow of traffic lest you run into people. Cars drive on the left side of roads, but on sidewalks the flow of traffic varies. I try walking on the left side of sidewalks to follow the road rules, but I've still got to be watchful since my theory does not always prove right. Bicycle riders here are bold, weaving in and out of heavy traffic flows. I seriously doubt a can of WD-40 is something every biker owns since i always hear screeching brakes. In Shibuya, a shopping/touristy area, there is one large crosswalk with many crosswalks intersecting since it is not square. It's kind of hard to describe so it seems, and it's also hard to follow when you're there! Basically there's a ton of people when it's busy.

More updates on the way!