The trip over...

Allright, as someone a hell of a lot smarter than I once said, "begin at the beginning."

Ok, here goes.

Well, as anyone who is reading this knows, I've taken off to the land of the rising sun to study some more. Hey, if you don't keep going to school, you don't keep getting Spring Break. That, and I really have no desire to join the workforce yet, so more parasitism thanks to Uncle Sam.

Now on to the pictures...

Leaving Columbus was difficult. The Mom-unit dropped me off at the airport and put on a good show of having a stiff upper lip. I tried to call Gwen (the sib), but, of course, couldn't get through. The little booger decided to surprise me and say goodbye in person. I hope she knows how much that mattered to me.

This was the last site I had of my hometown (as I wasn't in a window seat).


Ok, I could have still turned back at this point...


Ok, regarding the flight itself. I don't generally suggest a 13 hour flight, but it wasn't bad. Slept, read and all that jazz. I did get to see Hildalgo and an atrocious MaryKate and Ashley movie. The fact that those two little girls are billionares is scary. I never want to watch anther movie ever again...

Well, having landed in Narita, I wanted to see what the plane looked like (I know I should have checked it out prior to departure, but hey, what the hell).


The harbinger of doom for the Japanese culture, my plane...

Next stop, Customs!!!

Well, having decided to leave the midgets at home, I had nothing to declare, and the nice folks at Customs were foolish enough to let me in without searching my luggage. Not that I brought anything bad in, but honestly, would you trust me on site???

The Narita airport, and most of Tokyo I have found, is very gaijin friendly (that's the Japanese word for foreigner), and there was enough English around so that I could find the ticket booth for the "Friendly Airport Bus Service." I got my first big taste of Japanese culture from these nice folks. The attendants bowed at the bus as it drove off. Needless to say, at that point, I found it a little strange. Now, I get weirded out when people don't habitually bow to each other.




And just to prove how much I was "Robinson-carusoeing" this, this is everything that I brought with me. You'd be amazed at how much more I've accumulated in the past four months.


This is all I brought with me...

So I went a little camera-crazy, when in Rome...

Ok, just when I was feelling really freaked out, I looked out the window and saw...

BIKERS!!!


Really, that little blur at the right are a couple of dudes on Harley's.nbsp;

I knew then, that I'd be ok.

I had my first experience with a cabbie here, and let me tell you, there are no friendlier and more polite people on the face of the planet than Tokyo cabbies. Hell, this guy was wearing white gloves. After some wild gesticulating, he got the idea of where I wanted to go and dropped me off at my first digs.


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If you got a call from me on the first night, this is where it came from. Tiny huh? Just some foreshadowing of things to come...

This, friends and neighbors, is what the view looked like outside. One of the first times I got to really look around and study Tokyo.




Well, after a nap (I was pretty jet-lagged), I decided to do some exploring. My hotel was in the neighborhood where I would be living, and I thought it good to get out and mingle. Well, I wandered and figured out that I was finally in a foreign country where I was functionally illiterate and basically the conversational equivalent of the village idiot.

No comments from you...

Anyway, I decided to test the fundamentals and went to the hotel resturaunt for something to eat. The menue was entirely in Japanese. Oh, I don't mean the "romanization" of japanese with the English alphabet, I mean the full-bore Kanji characters. Thankfully, the headings of the menu sections were in English (why I couldn't tell you), and I found the "Fish and Beef" section. Thinking that since I like both fish and beef, I was set.

I pointed.

The waitress looked at me like I had just ordered a dead buffalo in cream sauce, but I was committed to my choice. It came and actually wasn't all that bad. It took me a few bites to figure out that it was fish, and not beef, and if you don't believe me, come over here and try it. It's like nothing I've ever had before.

Having survived dinner, I stopped off at a vending machine in the hotel lobbby and got this...


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Beer from a vending machine, I then knew that all would be right with the world.

That's about the whole travelling over here story. I'll probably remember other details in newer posts, but that's enough for now.

Look for more later, and I miss you all.