Japan!

It would figure that my first real vacation, I would go visit another country.

Actually, I have a childhood friend who lives in Tokyo. I meant to take some time to visit her before I got to China, but the visa, etc., made all of that impossible. So instead, I got tickets to Japan for our first break.

This post is something of an overview of how I traveled around Japan. See, flying into Tokyo is really expensive, but I heard from a friend that it's cheaper and easier to fly into Kansai International Airport in Osaka, and then take a train or a bus into Tokyo. The cool thing about Kansai is that the airport is actually on an artificial island. They built an island just so they could have an airport there. I was on the second terminal, which was very windy.

What I ended up doing was flying into Kansai and taking an "airport limousine" bus into Nara, a little town that's famous for its deer. Then, I took a night bus from Nara to Tokyo. (I'm sort of smug about not paying for a hotel for one night.)

The night bus was actually super comfortable!

Every seat had a blanket, slippers, a phone charging station, and a nice little curtain. I got lots of writing done! 

Here was the first real view I had of Tokyo:

Anyway, once I got into Tokyo, I just took the subway and the JR train everywhere. The subway train tickets are tiny!

Just like America, the subway trains have all kinds of ads on them. Here was one that made me smile:

There are a lot of TV commercials in an anime style, too.

Tokyo has all kinds of canals dug through it - either that, or they built a lot of square islands in the rivers - so we have lots of water views.

Also, I decided I would stay in one of those capsule hostels:

I don't know if you can see the phone on the shelf in the back? The one thing that's lit up? That's not my phone. That's a semi-phone called a handy that the hostel lets you use. That way, you can use maps and such and not get charged roaming data. It's pretty handy!

One of my traveling games is to see if there's a Guinness pub in every major city. I haven't seen one in Shenyang yet, but here in Tokyo...

One more thing you can do in Tokyo... there's a live Mario Kart tour. As in, you put on a costume, get on a go kart that looks like a Kart from Mario Kart, and get a tour of the city. In order to do that, you need an international driver's license, which I don't have, so I didn't get to do that. I did, however, get the chance to see it: 

I'm pretty sure that black-and-white one is the bullet bike

Once done with Tokyo, we took the shinkansen (the bullet train!) to Kyoto, the place that's famous for all the shrines. Once again, we got to stay in a capsule hostel!

Then, we took a direct train from Kyoto back to Kansai Airport. I'm explaining all of this because it actually was a struggle to figure out how it all worked, so I want to share it. There are all kinds of buses and trains that go between cities in Japan, so if you plan to book a trip there, definitely keep an eye out for those!

Anyway, I have a post from Nara, 3 days' worth of posts from Tokyo, and then a days' worth of posts from Kyoto to share. So I'll have lots to tell! Stay tuned!