A post from Japan

Well, I appear to be in Japan. Two days ago, I was getting a haircut, and I mentioned I was going to Japan, and the hairdresser said "Cool. Where's that?" So in order to avoid further stupid comments, I'll explain: Japan is a country. If you cross the ocean from California, you'll get there. It's very green and hot and muggy, at least in summer.

The first picture is some kind of twisty statue in Yokohama. This city is where my favorite youngest sister is staying. It is close to Tokyo, which is to say it takes about an hour on the train for us to get from our hotel to Yokohama. They have a kind of amusement park there with a ferris wheel, which we rode. I have a lot of photos taken from the ferris wheel, but I didn't have the presence of mind to take a picture of the ferris wheel itself. Interesting.

We left Utah Thursday morning and arrived in Japan on Friday afternoon. That might sound like it takes over 24 hours to get here, but it's mostly the time zone changes -- it really takes about 14 hours. My sister met us at the airport and I barely recognized her. She styled her hair to match the current Japanese fashion, and she was wearing a currently fashionable hat, which conspired to make her look different. Since she hasn't been posting pictures in her own blog, I'll stick one up for you.

The train ride from the airport to our hotel (in Akihabara, which is in central Tokyo) was really long--about 90 minutes, and the train was crowded enough that we had to stand the whole way. What made it seem twice as long is that we were carrying all our luggage with us. The luggage has this "neat" feature that it can roll in any direction, not just straight backward. This seems like a great idea until you realize it doesn't have any brakes! This means that on a train ride, it kind of wanders all over the place, and when there's people all around you it takes a lot of strenuous effort to keep it off of everyone's toes. On top of that, it doesn't roll too well when there's a lot of weight in it--Nathan's big luggage weighed a bit over 50 pounds, and the wheels completely gave out somewhere in the flight over. This makes it *very difficult* to move around, and we're busy making other plans for luggage.


For my final picture, I took a picture of a Japanese street scene. This was taken while hiking to the Square-Enix store to buy geeky products. The "differentness" of Japan really hits you when you're out on the streets. Simply wandering around the city, taking in all the sights and watching the people is a lot of the fun of being here. A lot of the buildings are a little dingy and grubby. Rather than focus on scrubbing the buildings till they sparkle (we'll call that the "Provo way"), they are instead covered from top to bottom with bright, cheesy advertising and signs. The entire city is covered in advertising of one sort or another, lots of bright colors, super-cute cartoon characters, and stylishly smug foreigners modeling exotic products. The Japanese love European-style sophistication, and most of their advertising uses Caucasians as models. The cacophony of advertising gives everything a noisy, cluttered feel, which is kind of fun but also kind of exhausting.

That's about all I have time for (and I probably won't be able to pump out a big post like this every day :P). I have church with my sister tomorrow, and need to go to bed to make it to the station in time.