Jam-Packed Day!

This is a catch-up post for Thursday, March 27th, our second day in Japan.

So after an uncomfortable night's sleep, I got up around 8:30, cleaned up a bit, and went downstairs to meet Jen and wait for our luggage. We waited in the freezing cold lobby until about 11, then decided to go up to my room, eat some cookies, and warm up. Before we went back down we went to visit Greg, who had been up for too many hours with no watch or sense of the passage of time. When we came back downstairs, our luggage had magically arrived!! Hooraaay, thanks Black Cat! Jen and I got showers and dressed, and then we all headed out for our first day of exploring! First we headed towards the city hall building (basically) to get our gaijin cards (alien registration), but on the way there we found a nice grocery store with a McDonald's inside and decided to make that our first lunch, haha. Jen and Greg got the Teritama burger, which is a teriyaki burger with an egg on top (we called it the Japanese Gusburger), but I played it safe with a double cheeseburger set. I did try a bite of Greg's sandwich and some of the Qoo drink he bought though.

Along the way on our trip, Jen and I made several stops at post offices and banks, trying to get someone, anyone to cash our traveler's checks. We asked in Japanese and everything, but everyone looked at them like they were some relic from the past, and could only tell us "Try a bank," or "Try a different bank." We moved on to city hall, and Jen and I registered for our gaijin cards, while Greg only half registered before we had to get him some photos taken for the card. They directed us to a cheap photo booth outside a department store a fair walk away, so we went! Greg got his photos, and we browsed the store for bedding. We all found a 3 piece bed set that we really liked in nice colors and on sale, so we decided to keep it in mind for after we shopped around. After browsing the Fashion Recycle STOMP store for a while, we returned to city hall and got Greg registered for his card. The nice city hall people also couldn't tell us where to take a traveler's check. Who knew it would be so much trouble!Favorite photo so far.

After all of that, we went to Warabi station and took a train into Shibuya to meet Dan. Aside from a bit of confusion when our train went backwards and took us back about three stops, we made it there just fine. Downtown Shibuya looks a lot like Times square, only every street after the first, bright billboard part, is still jam-packed with little shops and arcades and pachinko stores (they're REALLY big on pachinko here, it's a type of gambling game). There were tons of young people there and it seemed to be the cool place to hang out. First, Jen and I found a big Mizuho bank that would finally take our traveler's checks! The exchange rate was something like 97, it could've been worse. We were just happy to find somewhere to exchange them! Next We went around to a few stores and tried to find bedding and other household items at Tokyou Hands, but it was all overpriced and not very cute, so we didn't stay long.For dinner, Dan took us to a kaitenzushi place (sushi that is made fresh and comes out on a plate that goes around the restaurant, where you take a plate and they add up how many you ate at the end). This place was jam packed and all about speed. You had to finish within 20-30 minutes, but if you ate 7 plates, you could stay as long as you wanted. I'm notorious for eating slower than everyone around me, so this place wasn't too fun for me, hah. I managed to eat 6 plates, but I was starting to feel not so great by that time. I did have a funny cultural mishap there though. I saw the girl next to me get some water from a faucet at the table, which I then tried to do but couldn't really get it working, so she showed me how. Then they pointed out, hey, you're supposed to put this tea packet in it, and I was like "Oh cool! Hey Greg, you're supposed to put this tea packet in it," at which point I was trying to tear the packet open, so the Japanese couple starts yelling "Aaah! Sono mama de, sono mama de" which basically meant, as it is, don't tear it open it's a bag of tea you idiot. I guess that wasn't a cultural mishap so much as an I-don't-ever-drink-tea-and-forget-how-tea-works mishap, but it was still pretty cute and that couple was nice =)Greg decided it would be a good idea to eat these tiny octopi/squid/things you shouldn't eat

After that I think we bought Greg the kanji dictionary game for DS and then browsed a Sega arcade. I dropped 100 yen (about $1) on a win-some-candy game, but I didn't win any candy. Lame. The purikura (cool photo booth) section was girls only, or as we English speakers would apparently better understand it, "Female Limitation."

We were all pretty beat after that and knew we absolutely needed to get our bedding, so we all hopped on the train back to Warabi. This is where things started to get interesting. We walked the good 20 minute walk from Warabi Station to the department store where we saw the bedding earlier, picked out some other things we needed, and took our bedding to the cash register. This bedding was huge and came in a ridiculously huge package. There wasn't a non-awkward way to carry it. The plus side was that it was on sale twice over, so we ended up paying about $70 for the three piece set (a foam futon pad, a softer futon, and then a big comforter) which was a great deal. But then we had to carry it home, hadn't we?

We had gotten a great map from Uzuki-san, and thought we had a pretty good route home figured out, but we ended up getting lost three times. I say lost, but it was more like.. we knew what area we were in but not the exact street or direction. After asking the nice men who worked at the Shell station, a nice lady who came out of her house when she saw us on the street corner, and the nice worker at the 99 store, we finally got on the right road and made it home. I'm still not sure what made us look at that bedding and decide "Yeah, we can carry that home." I guess it was the same thing that lead us to build a fort out of a ping-pong table, no questions asked. It's just that sannin, can-do attitude. Or it might have been the daunting prospect of trying to get a taxi and the strong desire not to pay for one combined. No matter, we made it home with Uzuki-san watching us awkwardly as we brought in our large packages, probably thinking "Why didn't these crazy Americans just rent bedding from here?"
So after a way too long day with swollen achy feet, we all enjoyed a soft and warm night's sleep on our new, well-earned futons! Jen and I got pink and cream while Greg got blue and some other colors I don't remember. That's all for Thursday's wrap-up, expect a re-cap of today (Friday) sometime tonight perhaps!