Catchup Post #1 - Escape from Tokyo!

Alright, it's finally Christmas break for me and I'm done totally relaxing, so I'm going to try and catch up blogging for the last month I was in Japan! It was a big flurry of excitement and adventure and finals, so there was no way I could blog at the time! Here goes =)

So we last left off at the Tokyo Toy Show, which was pretty cool! A weekend or two after the Toy Show, I went to go visit my best friend Sada and her boyfriend David! They had studied abroad in Kyoto last year during the Spring semester and were back there again staying with their friend Sae before Sada went up north to Aomori to work at an archaeology field site (wow!). So I took a few days off from school plus the weekend to go visit them! Since they had been there for a semester before, they already know all the great places to take me =D I was sooo super excited to get out of the city and actually see some historical Japanese culture! And being in Japan together was one of my and Sada's dreams =D

So how did I get there? By bus! Kyoto is a pretty good distance away from Tokyo. You can take the Shinkansen (bullet train) I think, but it's majorly expensive! Instead, I took the night bus! It's a bus that goes during the night and is therefore cheaper than the regular bus. The total for the round trip was about $116. I bought my tickets online and just printed out a piece of paper and took it to the station! I was surprised how easy it was. I got really nervous waiting for my bus though. There were so many different buses and they each had a different name, I was scared I'd miss mine! It came right on time though and I got on just fine with my luggage and everything.

The bus was totally awesome. It was three levels, and it was a woman's only bus! Japan is cool about that sort of thing, probably because there are so many lecherous men in Japan it seems.. but on busy mornings, some trains make the first two cars of the train ladies only because it gets suuuuuper crowded and there are a lot of cases of men taking advantage of the situation to grope women >_< class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">decker night buses too, but as a foreigner and a woman it made me and my parents feel a lot better about me traveling alone to be on a women-only bus =) Plus there was like nobody on it. I was on the third floor and there were maybe three other women there!

The windows all had curtains so you could sleep, the chairs reclined super far, and they gave you slippers and a blanket! It was all pretty sweet =D I had a hard time sleeping, as I usually do in that sort of situation, but I really enjoyed looking out the window to see just how Tokyo connects to the rest of Japan, and getting my first glimpse of Japan outside of the city. I got to Kyoto a little earlier than expected, and it was really early in the morning (like 6:45), so the train station was pretty much closed. I tried to go in and use the restroom, but discovered something about Kyoto culture: public restrooms don't provide toilet paper in Kyoto! I think this is a pretty common Japan thing actually, but Tokyo is so modernized/westernized that I never ran into this in Tokyo. In Kyoto, people usually just carry around the free tissue packets that advertisers are often handing out, and there's also usually a tissue packet vending machine in the restroom. I also learned that most public toilets in Kyoto are the traditional Japanese "squatter" toilets, which I do not like at all! I think I only used those twice my whole time in Japan, and it was only in the locker room at school. Ughh it was majorly gross! So with not much else to do I just waited around for Sada and David, and they showed up pretty quickly! Hooray! I was so happy to see them ^^

We did so much on our first day that I'll leave this post for now and start a new one for Day 1 in Kyoto!