First day in Japan

Hello all,

Well, since we didn't get deported yesterday, here we are in Japan. We got out of the house by 9:00 and walked around the city we're staying in (Utsunomiya, population 400,000). The first place we found was a gaming parlor, and those things are AMAZING. You pay for the time you spend in there, and you get a fully-stocked library of manga, a cubicle with a computer and internet (and a very cushy floor, and slippers), pool tables, darts, and karaoke. We spent half an hour in there for 300 yen a person.

After that we found the Japanese equivalent of a dollar store. Their English translations were hysterical; if I could find any advertising in the U.S. that thorough and polite I'd be more inclined to spend money. We also bought the most random Japanese candy we could find, which turned out to be really tasty (they're hard candies with sour centers).

Then we found lunch. The highlight of the day thus far: a sushi place that serves a plate for 100 yen. There's a conveyor belt going around a bar in the middle of the restaurant with plates of sushi, two on a plate, and you just pick them off, eat the sushi, and keep the plate. At the end they tally up the plates and charge you. We had four bowls of miso soup and about 40 pieces of sushi for 2100 yen. Did I mention there was green tea that you could make at your table for free?

One thing I really love bout this place is how respectful everyone is. I don't just mean everyone is polite (they are), but that people truly respect where they are and what they do. The neighborhood we're in is meticulously clean, and everyone we've met thus far has been amazingly helpful. Yesterday when we got our rail passes, the woman at the desk reserved us seats on the trains we needed to take and explained how the ticket system worked, the woman at the station who scanned our rail passes ran after us when she saw us going the wrong way and redirected us, and the security guard at the platform showed us where we should stand to get into the right car and then signalled us when our train pulled in. I defy you to find that level of service in America

So all in all, I love it here. I can't wait to see how the next two months turn out. I'll keep you updated.

So long,

ian