Japan - Day 1 - Part II

The N700 finally arrives, we all board the train excitedly, nothing eventful that I can recall takes place during our 54 minute train ride, we each snap a few photos to commerate the memory of our first train ride in Japan.









Mind you, it's about 7PM in Japan right now and we've all been up and travelling for about 24 hours by now.

We somehow manage to find our way out of the subway sytem and use a map to locate our hotel, the hotel was surprisingly enough easy to find and relatively close to the station.

Steve makes his way up to the check in counter, winks at the male recptionist and proceeds to check us in. They have us each fill in information cards and inform us that if any of us are feeling slightly under the weather that we need to inform them of it.

After we get our room key, we hang around the hotel lobby for a bit and wait while Steve left to bring his friend, who is currently living in Japan to the hotel. A little while longer we head our way up to the third floor, drop our bags off and quickly run to the airplane sized washroom to take pictures of the toilet. After that we finally make use of the facilities to freshen ourselves up.












We proceed to head out to begin our first of many nightly adventures, Steve's friend, MangaMan, proceeds to show us around our neighbourhood, pointing out to us, what is what, what is a good place to eat etc.












We walk around a bit and finally settle down at a local bar for some drinks and bar food. None of us are fluent in Japanese, so we rely on the simple ordering method of pointing to pictures of the dishes that they have available. Sadly enough the size depicted in the pictures were really deceiving. Needless to say, since we were expecting somewhat of a real meal after 27 hours of travel time, we didn't stay long at that venue.
We wander down a couple of streets and decide to eat at a restuarant that appears to be pretty popular with the locals. We each order a tonne of food, which included a bowl of noodles, bowl cupped yet in a plate of fried rice and some dumplings to go with it. Since I was in Japan, I had to try the Sake, the Sake I ordered was suppose to be cold and it tasted just like Vodka, needless to say, I did not try it again in Japan.
MangaMan informed us that in Japan, they usually take a mixture of three sauces and mix it together to dip their dumplings in, however when he informed us of this, Steve had already consumed half of his dumplings. I think this was Steve's first of many fails.

After dinner, we continued to wander around the streets for a bit, just relaxing and gathering in the nightlife, soon after we departed with MangaMan since he had to work a 10hour shift the next day. Before he departed, we drilled him for information on the red light district, Kabukicho, and he parted us with great advice, use protection.

After we left we decided to head back to the hotel to get some rest for our official full day as a tourist in Japan, since it would be an early one.