The crossing from Hawaii to Japan was fairly uneventful and filled with class. We left the night of January 28th and did not get to Japan until February 9th, which was ten whole days at sea. It would have been 11 days, but we crossed the International Date Line which made us lose a day. We went to bed on the night of the 2nd, and we woke up on the 4th, which was a weird feeling. During this crossing, I spent most of my time going to class, reading for class, laying on the deck, and attending various activities such as Salsa Dancing, Spiritual Dance, watching movies, and playing cards. They have a lot of clubs, dance classes, and lectures you can attend to pass the time. Salsa dancing is every B day on the outside deck, which is a lot of fun really difficult to do on a rocking ship. Spiritual Dance is a fun dance where they play one spiritual song, then one modern dance song, and it keeps going back and forth. It is really fun and you have to dance ridiculous and run in circles, and the songs get faster tempo until the end, when the leader puts on a slow spiritual chant, and you relax and meditate for a little bit before it ends.
The weather across was very mixed. The first two days were pretty windy with whitecaps and small swells with storms on the horizon, but it wasn’t too bad. After that we had a few days of nice weather where we could lie out on the deck in the sun which was very nice. Three days before we arrived in Japan, we got an announcement that said that there was a big storm between us and Japan and we would have to go around it. The ship had to divert its course 190 nautical miles around the south end of the storm. We had some really rough swells while we were going around, but they weren’t like the swells we had on our way to Hawaii. Going to Hawaii the swells were big and very uniform, so they rocked the ship in regular intervals. These waves were very choppy and misshapen so they would rock and shake the ship in random directions. Every so often, a big swell would hit us at a strange angle and it would make a big crashing noise that could be heard in any part of the ship. The first time I heard it, it woke me up and I thought that we actually hit something. We were supposed to be 12 hours late getting to Yokohama because of how far we had to go around the storm, but fortunately the weather cleared up on our last day at sea and the captain got the speed back up and made up for lost time. We ended up only arriving around 2-3 hours late.

Japan was absolutely incredible. We had five days and four nights, from 1200 on February 9th to 1800 on February 23rd, to see as much of the country as possible. We pulled into port around 0930 and we had to wait around while they checked all of our customs and immigration forms. They started letting us off the ship around 1030, but you can only get off when they call your “sea.” All the rooms in the ship are part of a sea; it is just the name for your hall or part of your hall. I am in the Mediterranean Sea which is most of the 3rd floor port side rooms. I could get off the ship around 1200 which I did so with my friends from Hawaii: Corena, Elena, and Erin. We got off the ship and we went through a pretty thorough immigration procedure. We had to scan our fingerprints and do a thermal scan to make sure we weren’t sick. If you were sick, you weren’t allowed to get off the ship. No one that I know of was held on the ship due to sickness, the ship is very clean and not many people have gotten sick this whole voyage. After passing through immigration, we were in the main hall of the port building which is just like any other port building; it had seats, kiosks, information booths, and all that. The amazing thing about this building is how it looked from the outside. It was mostly wooden, almost no sharp edges, and you could walk all over the outside of it. It was more of a place for the people of Yokohama to come and hang out and go for runs and walk their dogs than it was a landing place for tourists. We exited this beautiful building and we were right in the heart of downtown Yokohama. The first thing we had to do was go get some Japanese currency, the Yen. We asked around for a bank and we got some very vague directions from some fellow SASers. We decided just to walk down the main boulevard because we thought there had to be a bank somewhere along the way. We found one after walking about two blocks (which were pretty long) and we went inside. It was multiple stories and a lot more complicated than our banks. We found the ATMs in the corner and I tried to withdraw money while my other friends went upstairs to a foreign currency exchange. Right now, it is about 89 Yen to 1 USD. We pretty much simplify it to 100 Yen equals 1 USD. I may have done a miscalculation at the ATM because for a moment I thought that it was 1,000 Yen to the dollar. I tried to withdraw 100,000 Yen, which to my math would have been 100 dollars, but it was actually 1,000. Fortunately, the bank declined this withdrawal, but this also made me scared. I figured the bank had cancelled my card after being used in Hawaii, even though I had called and told them where I was traveling. I ran upstairs to tell my friends and they corrected me on my error. Feeling better, I went down to the ATM and tried to withdraw just 10,000 Yen, but yet again I was denied. Now I was afraid that since I had tried to withdraw such a large amount, my credit card company thought it was stolen and cancelled it. I tried a different card and I was still denied, which scared me even more. I tried to ask people working at the bank what was wrong, but the language barrier was too hard and I didn’t get any information. We decided to try a different bank, which we found quickly, but my cards were still denied. I was starting to feel very uncomfortable being in a foreign country with no money. We just decided to go out to lunch, where I would borrow some money from my friends, and after we would go back to the ship where I had some USD that I could bring to the bank to exchange. We ended up in the Chinatown (ironically) of Yokohama which is filled with pedestrian streets, bright lights, and lots of street vendors. We walked around until we found a good looking restaurant and went inside. We were seated on the second floor (most stores and restaurants are multiple stories in Japan) where our waiter came up and gave us an English menu. Normally in Japan, you only get one menu for everyone at the table which makes things take a little longer. Sit down restaurant meals are supposed to take a long time and are very proper and served in small portions. Our waiter came, who hardly spoke any English, came up and took our order which was a fun experience trying to communicate through hand gestures and pointing at the menu. Fortunately, almost all of the restaurants had their dishes in display in the window and pictures on the menu. We all ordered a dish and shared everything. The food was delicious, we had everything from Shark Fin (I don’t approve of killing the sharks but I figured I had to try it!) to pork and beef in various sauces. This was a Chinese meal, but we figured we still had five days and lots of meals to get traditional Japanese food. After lunch, we decided just to walk around the downtown area of Yokohama and see what there is to see. The Japanese architecture is very beautiful and ergonomic. The buildings are very close together, there aren’t very many zoning laws so houses would be next to stores which would be next to office buildings, and they are built to maximize space. The coolest thing I saw was a parking garage for a residential complex that consisted of a car elevator that would take you car up to a small slot in a steel structure where you would leave it. These were all over which was very cool. As we were walking around, we ran into another group of SAS kids who I told about my money situation. They told me that there were very few banks/ATMs that would accept American cards; one of them was at the post office that was near the ship. We headed straight there and I tried my card and it worked! This made the rest of the day much more enjoyable for me because I didn’t have to worry about how I was going to get through the next five days. After getting money, we headed for the central park in Yokohama, aptly named Yokohama Park. It is really interesting that every major city in Japan is required to have a very large open park in the center of the city to be used as an evacuation area during a major earthquake. The park was beautiful. They had ponds with turtles and coy, fountains, trees, and the little Japanese bridges. There was also the giant Yokohama baseball stadium in this park which was easily bigger than PacBell Park. Baseball is a huge sport in Japan that lots of people love to go and see the games. For the rest of the day we walked around and looked at all the buildings until we went back to the ship to meet our other friend Michael at 2030. We were planning on going out and getting sushi, but by the time we got out of the ship and into town it was about 2100. In Japan, many restaurants close around this time, so no good sushi places were open. We just kept walking around until we found a small restaurant where we got small pork, beef, and even squid dishes. We all tried a glass of hot Sake which is the Japanese rice wine. I thought it was an interesting taste, like white wine with a splash of vodka in it, but after a few sips I decided that I liked it. It was all very good. After dinner we walked along the water to the financial district, where all the really tall buildings were. We ended up just walking around for most of the night looking at the lights of the buildings and the ports. We headed back to the ship around midnight after exploring and taking lots of pictures.
The next morning I woke up around 0900 and had a slow morning packing and cleaning up my room because I was scheduled to meet my travel group at 1230 in the atrium of the ship. At 1230 I met up with my friends Eric, Rory, Candice, Carly, and Kayleigh. We walked out of the ship and met up with a group of three other people that were with two local Japanese girls who were going to show us how to use the Japanese train and subway station. We walked about two blocks into town where we descended into our first subway station. The subway and train maps look extraordinarily complicated, but after you figure out what is going on in the maze of colored lines, it is really easy to figure out. Once we got our tutorial, we bought our tickets, separated from the three other SASers and the Japanese girls, and hopped on the first train to Tokyo. We took the train to the main Tokyo station in the very heart of the city. We got out of the station and started walking around the downtown area. We were trying to find a Tourist Information Center, but we only had a poorly drawn map from a Japanese local, and we never found where it was. We did see two Japanese college students crawling along the sidewalk so we asked them what they were doing. What we picked up from their scattered English was that they were worshiping the train. They said that the train travels so fast and that people take it for granted so they were demonstrating how slow in relation to the train humans go. It was slightly weird, but they were very nice and fun to converse with. We walked around for about 20 minutes and realized there wasn’t a whole lot to do besides look at the giant office buildings. We hopped back on a subway and took it to a district of Tokyo called Shibuya. Shibuya is the big yuppie area of Tokyo. It has a lot of entertainment places such as bars, karaoke, restaurants, and shopping areas. We arrived and the first thing we wanted to do was find a hotel and but down all of our backpacks and other stuff we had been lugging around all day. We looked at a local map and found the closest hotel. It was about two blocks from the main downtown corner of Shibuya which you have probably seen in photos. It is very New York looking with a crosswalk that crosses all the corners of the street. In Japan, it is very against their culture to jaywalk and everybody waits for the green light to cross. At this intersection, when people cross the street, it becomes a sea of people. Fortunately for me, I was about a full head taller than everyone there, so I could still easily see all my friends. Also, I was wearing my red beanie so if people got separated, they just looked around for the “red beacon” above everyone else. The night we got there, it was very cold and drizzly, so we just headed straight for the closest hotel. In Japan, they charge hotel rooms by the person, and in most hotels, they do not allow unmarried men and women to stay in the same room. What we would do was send in two people to book the room, and the rest of us would find the back door to the hotel and sneak in and meet them in the hotel. The first hotel we stayed at was called the Granbell Hotel. It was a very nice and modern hotel with black hallways and bright neon doors. Our room was like any other hotel room, pretty nice, but it had no door in front of the shower, only a see through curtain which made things interesting. After throwing our stuff down in the room and washing up a bit, we exited the hotel and started looking for a place to eat. We walked back to the big intersection of Shibuya, turned up one of the main streets, and then turned on to a small and narrow pedestrian street with lots of shops and restaurants. We were walking around trying to find a traditional Japanese restaurant, but everything in that area was a fusion. We saw Japanese-Hawaiian, Japanese-Spanish, and Japanese-Italian. We ended up at a Japanese-Italian restaurant which I couldn’t find the name of because it was only written in Japanese characters. We ordered pasta dishes that were made of Japanese noodles with Italian sauces served with tea and Miso Soup. It was delicious. After dinner we started walking up and down all the streets around that area. The only store we went into was the Disney Store because we wanted to see how decorated it was. The store was three stories and each story had a different theme; the first floor was Mickey Mouse, second was Toy Story and Pinocchio, and the third story was all the Princesses. It was pretty crazy how detailed the store was. We didn’t spend too much time in there, we just wanted to take a quick look, so after we left we decided to go look for a karaoke bar. This was not hard to find. They are all over Tokyo and other cities in Japan. They are a very popular place for Japanese businessmen to go and have meetings after work which is a lot more fun than a fancy restaurant. Also, the way karaoke bars work is you walk into a main lobby and you rent out a private room where you go up and get your own TV and songbook while waiters bring up food and drink to you. We rented out the room for 2 hours and sang our hearts out. The list of songs they had was amazing; the size of the book they gave us was easily bigger than a dictionary. We looked up a song we wanted in the book, it told us a number, then we entered the number into the karaoke machine and the song would play. The funniest thing was that the English words for all the songs weren’t translated perfectly, so there were some wrong words that were pretty funny. After karaoke, we walked around Shibuya a little more, stopped in a small restaurant bar and got a glass of sake before heading back to the hotel. We turned on the TV before heading to bed and watched a little Japanese television. It was pretty funny. There were some ridiculous Japanese game shows and we turned on the news for the weather and the weather lady stood in front of a map (not a green screen) and held up anime pictures of snowmen for snow and umbrellas for rain and made them dance across the map. Not quite as advanced as I thought that the news would be, but it was very colorful.
The next morning we woke up around 0600, showered, and headed out for the train station. We bought our first bullet train ticket, picked up a quick breakfast at a Japanese bakery in the train station, and went up to the platform to wait for the train to Hiroshima. We had to take the train to Osaka, have a ten minute layover, then continue on to Hiroshima. The trains in Japan are on time to the minute, which is amazing and very reliable. The train pulled up right on time, we got on, and sat in our assigned seats. I was on the aisle seat, my friend Carly was in the center seat, and a sleeping Japanese woman was by the window. The other members of our group were scattered behind us. The train started moving and I didn’t even know it. It was so smooth. I saw the train next to us start moving by the window, so I assumed that it was leaving. All of a sudden, the train ended and I saw that it was actually us that was moving. The acceleration and braking mechanisms are extraordinarily smooth and quiet. The train we were on traveled at about 200 kmh which is about 120 mph. I was trying to take pictures out the window but things were flying by so fast I didn’t have time. About thirty minutes into the train ride, Carly and I were talking and a Japanese woman from one row behind us comes up and asks me where we were from. I told her I was from California and asked her if she had ever been to the United States but she didn’t speak enough English to understand. She went back to her seat and I thought I had embarrassed her, but she came back thirty seconds later with two candies for Carly and I. We said “arigato gozaimas” which means thank you very much. She smiled and bowed and returned to her seat. We ate the candy which was a delicious chewy caramel candy. Five minutes later, she came back with two small burrito looking things wrapped in tinfoil. She handed them to us and said “homemade,” and we thanked her for them. We opened them up and they were thick tortillas, more like brad than tortilla, wrapped around pork and lettuce. It was very good and I turned around, rubbed my tummy, gave her the thumbs up, and said, “Delicious!” She understood that and smiled proudly. This is just an example of Japanese generosity. This was not the only time on the trip that this happened. In Japan, if someone knows how to speak English, they will come up to you and talk and try and help you, but if they don’t speak any English, they will be very embarrassed and walk away. The train ride to Osaka was about two and a half hours, and slightly disappointing because the weather was not that good. We were supposed to see Mt. Fuji from the train but it was too cloudy and gloomy. The thing that struck me the most was that even traveling across half of the country, we never really left urban areas. There were houses and buildings the whole way there, which was actually pretty cool. I liked looking at the smaller, residential districts up in the mountains because they were beautifully integrated into the valleys. We even saw patches of snow at the tops of some of the passes! We arrived in Osaka on time to the minute, got off the train, walked over to the platform next to us, and hopped on the train to Hiroshima. This train ride was only about 40 minutes and not too exciting because a lot of it was through tunnels. We got off in Hiroshima and it was raining pretty hard. I had packed my rain jacket so I threw that on and some of my group members bought cheap umbrellas, which were on sale everywhere. We hopped on the local streetcar and took it to the International Peace Park, right under the epicenter of the atomic bomb. The peace park is on an island formed by a river coming down through the city, and forking about a couple miles from the ocean, creating an island. The US dropped the bomb on this part of the city because the fork in the river was in the dead center of the city and very easy to see from the air. There is also a T-shaped bridge connecting the island with both sides of the river creating a highly visible target. We got off the streetcar, crossed the street, and the first thing we saw was “The A-Bomb Dome.” The Dome was originally called the Hiroshima Prefecture Industrial Promotion Hall and it’s is on the edge of the river, not on the island, but looking across to it, and it is the closest building to the epicenter of the blast that remained standing. It was once a center for art that had a beautiful green copper dome on the top, but now all that is left are a few cement walls and the steel structure that held up the copper dome. This is the only building that has been preserved exactly the way it was after the bombing. We walked around it a few times, and then crossed the T-shaped bridge (which had been rebuilt how it was) onto the island. There were a whole bunch of shrines that were dedicated to peace and all the people that had died. They had a Peace Bell, that when rung could be heard throughout the whole park. The most touching shrine to me was a shrine called the Children’s Peace Monument dedicated to Sadako Sasaki who was a girl who survived the Hiroshima bombing when she was only two. She grew to the age of twelve when she was diagnosed with leukemia and given a year to live. An old Japanese story is that if you fold 1,000 paper cranes, than you will be granted one wish, so Sadako started folding cranes. Sadako died on October 25, 1955 having completed her goal of folding 1,000 paper cranes but her wish did not come true. She had finished her 1,000 back in August, but kept folding more until her death in October. To this day, people still bring cranes to put on display at the memorial in honor of her. Another striking monument was a big mound with the ashes of over 70,000 people inside who had died in the blast. All these shrines were near the fork of the river at the north end of the park, and at the south end of the park was the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Between the museum and shrines, there is a long pool of water and a cenotaph with all of the (known) names of the people who died in the blast being covered by a saddle shaped stone monument that is said to represent a shelter for the souls of the victims. The cenotaph also says, “Rest in peace, for the error shall not be repeated.” After walking around the park in the dreary rain (as if it wasn’t sad enough) we entered the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. We got our ticket and a listening device to tell you about all of the exhibits as you walk around. The museum was done very well, starting out with the history of Hiroshima and why it was a target for the bombing. Hiroshima was a big military industrial city where they were making weapons and it was also where the entire 5th regiment was mobilized. Then it talked about the actual blast. There were two huge dioramas in the center of the main room; one with a layout of Hiroshima before the bomb went off, and one after. The damage done was incredible. The first diorama had at least 300 buildings, streets, bridges, and factories. The next had almost nothing. There were faint lines of where streets used to be, one or two bridges standing, and only about seven buildings. The bomb dropped was known as Little Boy. It was a Uranium fission bomb about 10 feet in length and about two to three feet wide. The bomb had 60kg of Uranium 235, of which only about 1kg actually detonated. This bomb is different from Fat Man, which was dropped on Nagasaki five days later, which was a Plutonium bomb and more powerful. Little Boy, which was an air detonation bomb, detonated 600 meters in the air for maximum damage, about a couple hundred meters south east of the T-shape bridge target at 8:15am on August 6, 1945. The explosion turned the air temperature to about 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit melting all copper and incinerating all the houses (which at this time were mostly made of wood). Fortunately, because of all the air raids over Hiroshima before the nuclear bomb, most of the children were evacuated outside of the city to a nearby valley where they would be kept safe. All the children that were evacuated survived the bomb, but they were all orphaned. It was a squad of three planes that dropped the bomb: one B-29 bomber and two other aircraft carrying survey equipment and cameras. Since it was only three planes, the Japanese thought it was a reconnaissance mission and did not sounds the air raid alarms, so no one went down to their bomb shelters, even though it probably wouldn’t have helped. After all the exhibits on the bomb itself, they showed the after effects on the city and radiation on the people. There were some gruesome pictures of people with radiation sickness and actual pieces of buildings that were melted and torn up. This area of the museum was incredibly depressing and moving. After that section, they talked about the world’s current nuclear situation. The governor of Hiroshima has written a letter protesting every nuclear test after Hiroshima. They displayed every letter ever written and it took up about two whole walls. By this time, the museum was closing so we had to hurry through the rest. We headed outside into the rain and none of us said much. We saw one of the LLCs of someone in our group and he recommended a good restaurant in downtown Hiroshima. We walked through a covered pedestrian street with many bright shops all the way there. We entered the restaurant which was a small, skinny, two story restaurant in the back alley of a side street. There specialty there was called Okonomi-yaki, which is the Japanese version of a pancake-pizza. It is a big doughy oval bread topped with noodles and a dark sauce. You can get different toppings and I got egg, cheese, and green onion. It was very good and I also got a Japanese beer called Sapporo with it. Everyone felt much better after sitting in a warm room and getting some good hot food in us. We finished our dinner and hopped on a streetcar and headed back to the train station. We got on another bullet train and headed for Kyoto. We arrived around 2000 and just checked into the first hotel we saw, which was called the New Miyako Hotel, which was right across the street from the train station. We sent two girls to get a room while we snuck in the back and waited for them. We got to the room, which was much smaller (yet much cheaper) than the first night, but we were all so tired we didn’t really care. Eric, Kayleigh, Carly, and I ran across the street to grab some Japanese snacks, returned to the room, talked for a bit, then fell asleep.
We woke up early the next morning and checked out of the hotel. We hopped on the subway and rode it up to the Imperial Palace. Kyoto was the capital of Japan until 1876, when it was moved to Tokyo. The Imperial Palace was a huge park with wide gravel pedestrian streets and the actual palace in the middle. We walked around the gardens and the trees for a bit before checking out the palace. The front gate was extremely impressive, a big wooden door with the pagoda style roof and painted gold in places. Unfortunately, you need to apply for a permit to actually go inside the palace which we didn’t do. We walked around the exterior of the wall and headed back for the gate we came in. We found a small pond with a Japanese pagoda house and a very traditional bridge which we walked around. It was beautiful. On our way out, we found a visitor center, which is in a building that used to be a house for one of the royal families. We had to take off our shoes and put on sandals they gave us to go inside. The house was very pristine with big wooden rooms, a garden in the middle, and a lot of sliding paper doors. Very traditional. We walked around and saw a photo gallery comparing the palace now to how it was two hundred years ago, which was neat. After exploring in there we took the subway to the biggest Buddhist temple in Japan called Shinshu Hombyo. The biggest building in the complex, The Goei-do, is also one of the largest wooden buildings in the world. One of the traditions before going into a sacred place is you have to wash your hands and mouth in a spiritual fountain outside the temple. This fountain had an elaborate dragon with the water coming out of its mouth into a stone pool. You scoop up the water in copper ladles, and you pour it over your hands and mouth. After washing up, we took our shoes off at the bottom of the stairs and went inside. We were very fortunate to catch the end of a Buddhist service that was going on. We sat in the middle of a huge wooden and golden room and listen to a group of about 20 monks do a beautiful religious chant in front of a big golden Buddha. At the end of the chant, one spoke a short passage from a book, then they all got up and left in complete silence. We weren’t allowed to take any photos inside the temple, but it was beautiful. There were intricate sculptures on the wood and a beautiful shrine set up in front of the Buddha. We left the temple and went into a small family owned restaurant across the street for lunch. It could seat about 15 people, and the six of us with our backpacks almost filled up the whole place. There was no English menu, but the lady who ran it was very excited to have us Americans come visit her restaurant. She told us in very scattered English that their main specialty was bowls of noodle soup with different toppings such as pork, chicken, tofu, and egg. We all ordered a bowl, I got chicken, and it was served to us with a cup of tea. It was great, but it was very difficult to eat soup with chopsticks, but we figured out from watching the only other person in the restaurant that you eat all the stuff in the soup with the chopsticks first, and then you just drink the broth. After we got this warm meal in us we headed back to the train station and hopped on a train to Osaka. When we got to Osaka, it was already night time. We wondered around the streets which reminded me of the Shibuya district in Tokyo. There were lots of bright lights, shops, and a whole bunch of restaurants. That night we wanted sushi, I have only had one bite of sushi in my life before and I didn’t really care for it so I figured I should get some good Japanese sushi. No one in my group is really a big sushi fan, but we thought we should try it anyway. We looked on the map and found a highly recommended sushi place in the Namba district where we were. We walked in, told them we had six people, and they told us to wait for a bit. After about 5 minutes, they told us to take the elevator up to the third floor to eat there. It seems most big restaurants have multiple floors for different purposes. Since we had such a big group, we were sent to the floor where there were mostly Japanese businessmen having meetings. There were a bunch of big, yet private, tables that were only about a foot off the ground where you could sit cross legged, on your knees, or (if you’re like me) you could put your legs under the table where they had a hole so you could sit in the normal sitting position. They gave us a menu with an English translation book (some of the items translated hilariously. For example the description of a drink: Fruit liqueur of the fresh and young taste that I finished without. I used condensed apple fruit juice luxuriously, and using the sugar.) and we picked out some big combo platter plates that we all split between us. To order, we had little buttons on the table, and we would press them and they would send a signal to the hostess who would send a waitress to our table. It was really nice because we could call the waitress whenever we wanted. On our platters were Shrimp tempura, octopus, tuna, squid, eel, some rolls, and many other types of fish that none of us knew what it was. Honestly, I wasn’t a very big fan of any of it, except for the shrimp tempura. None of us really were, but we had a really fun time guessing and tasting, and it was a Japanese experience. After dinner, we exited the restaurant into the freezing cold. We decided we wanted to warm up so we walked around and tried to find a traditional Japanese bar. All the places we saw were big nightclubs or themed bars, but we just wanted a traditional one. We finally saw a small sign pointing to a back alley that said “bar” on it. We started heading back there, and it looked a little bit sketchy and we almost turned around, but we decided to just take a quick peek in and if it was too run down, we would just leave. We looked inside and it was a very long and narrow bar that could seat about a maximum of 10-12 people. It was lit very nicely and there was no one else in there, so we decided to go in and see what the bartender was like. We all sat down, and he looked a little worried seeing six American kids walk into his little bar, but we all ordered a drink and started talking with him. At first he was shy because he hardly spoke English and it was hard to talk to him, but we kept just trying. Apparently, Japan has a very different bar culture, we asked him his name and he said, “Why would you Americans want to know my name?” As if normally people don’t care what their bartender’s name is. Once we convinced him we weren’t the stereotype stuck up Americans and that we actually wanted to learn about Japanese culture, he really opened up to us. He told us his name was Sato, and we asked him about his life, why he became a bartender, what the people are like in Osaka, what is his favorite part about Osaka, and all that. We talked to him for a good hour and a half and decided that we should leave because we were going to take the train to Kobe and spend the night on the ship to save hotel fees. We got back to the station which was only about two blocks away, bought our train tickets, and went to Kobe. We pulled into the Kobe around midnight, and got off at Kobe Station, which (apparently) is not the closest stop to the ship. We looked at a map and saw where the Port of Kobe was where we were told the ship was, and did the five minute walk down to the pier. When we got down to the pier there was no ship… We started getting a little scared because it is normally easy to see the MV Explorer because it has a very bright string of lights that run from the bow to stern over the top of the ship. We decided to walk to the end of the pier and take a look around to see if we could see the lights. We walked all the way down, and about two miles away we could see the bright string of lights on the other side of a group of small buildings. That is when we learned that the Port of Kobe runs along about half the city. We decided to walk the distance because we would only have half of the day tomorrow to see Kobe and we didn’t want to waste any time. We had a really pleasant walk along the wharfs and we saw a bunch of cool boats and hotels and got to the ship around 0045. We boarded, went to our rooms, and crashed in our beds that we hadn’t slept in since we left Yokohama.
We met for breakfast at around 0700 the next morning and the plan for the day was to go up to Arima, which is a small suburb in the mountains behind Kobe, and visit the Onsen (Japanese word for volcanic hot springs). We found out it was very difficult to get to Arima, which wasn’t very far away but it required four train transfers. We may have taken the wrong train once or twice, but we always figured it out by the next stop. The train ride up was beautiful; we were traveling through the Japanese mountains in valleys and passing by small towns. We got off the train and looked around. We had no idea where the Onsen was and we started asking around. We had heard about different types, there was a golden one from all the iron in it and even a clear radioactive one. I wanted to go to the radioactive one but other group members weren’t so excited. It was very difficult finding someone who could speak English because we were in a smaller Japanese town. Eventually we found out that there were a whole bunch scattered throughout the city, and the man circled a few on the map we had. We started trekking up the sloped town of Arima, keeping an eye out for anything that looked like a hot spring. The town itself was beautiful. It was in a valley, sloping upwards, with a river flowing down the middle. The great thing about the river is that it was in a deep cement gorge, built for floods like the LA waterway, with a deeper part in the middle for the normal water flow. Instead of just a straight river down the middle, it twisted and turned in intricate patterns with spirals, bridges, and islands. Following along this, we made our way to the central intersection in the town. We asked directions again and made our way up small, steep, winding roads that were packed with cars squeezing by each other with less than six inches to spare. We ran across some large stone stairs heading up out of eyesight and we decided to follow them because we were curious where they headed. We got to the top of the stairs and found a small shrine. There were plants potted in stone pedestals with water on the top, but overnight, the water had frozen it was beautiful seeing red, yellow, and blue flowers growing out of the ice. The shrine itself was a Buddhist shrine with a golden Buddha in the middle surrounded by other smaller statues, lamps, and candles. After walking around the shrine, we asked for directions again (since we diverted off our last directions to go up the stairs to the shrine) and the man could only point down the road. It turned out that we were only about a block away from one of the best bathhouses in Arima. The way the bathhouses work is by taking super hot water that is heated by the natural hot springs and pumping them into a nicely decorated pool. We entered the house and took our shoes off and put them in small lockers and then we proceeded down a hallway where the girls go to the right and the guys go to the left. This is an actual Japanese bathhouse, not a tourist attraction, which means that there are actual Japanese rules, such as absolutely no clothes allowed in the bath. We walked into the changing room, stripped down, and entered the room with the bath. There was a big wall running down the middle of the room; girls on one side, boys on the other. The bath was more like a big shallow pool that ran along the wall. On the opposite side of the bath and the wall there was a whole wall with little stools, mirrors, showerheads, and soap. You actually have to wash yourself before you get into the bath. You sit on the little stool and you get a bucket and a detachable showerhead. You get yourself wet, soap up, and then fill up the bucket and rinse off. Once you are clean, you can get into the bath. This was hotter than anything I have ever been in before, it probably wouldn’t be legal in the United States. You could sit on the floor of the bath, where the water came up to your neck, or you could sit on the seat, where the water would come up to mid chest, or you could sit on the edge with just your legs in the bath. I tried to sit all the way up to my neck, but I only lasted about thirty seconds it was that hot. I sat on the seat for a while, but even then I was still overheating incredibly fast. I sat with just my legs in the water and finally had to get out, go back to the shower area and drench myself in cold water. I repeated this system about three times before I had to once and for all get out of the heat. While I was dying in the hot water, other Japanese men were sitting in the deep area the whole time while I was getting overheated and cooling myself off. I was in the bath for no more than thirty minutes, but it was the best I had felt the whole trip. My entire body was relaxed and my sore muscles from walking around for the past four days hurt no more. I headed back to the locker room and, of course, I didn’t have a towel and when we had entered the bath house, I assumed they would be in the changing room, but apparently you have to rent them out from the front desk. I spent about fifteen minutes drying myself in front of a fan and with hairdryers before I could put my clothes back on. I headed out and the group all met back up in the lobby of the bathhouse. We went outside back into the freezing cold and wished we could get back in the bath. We headed down to the main intersection where there was a bus stop that would take us directly back to Kobe, without all of the confusing transfers of the train. We saw that the bus was coming at 1250 and since it was only 1200, we decided to get some lunch. We wandered around a few streets, taking pictures, until we came across a rice and noodle restaurant. Yet again, the meal was amazing. I got a rice bowl with pork on top with a side of green tea and Miso Soup. By this point, I had no problem eating plain rice with chopsticks; I am quite proud of my proficiency. We finished our lunch and walked back down to the bus stop, it pulled up as we were getting to the stop and we were about to get on until we were stopped by some lifelong learners. They told us we were getting on the wrong bus, even though I was pretty sure we weren’t, and they told us that this was the slow bus that takes 50 minutes and we should wait for the express bus that takes 30 minutes. We decided to listen to them and wait for the bus they were thinking of. They said that the right bus was supposed to come at 1300, and we waited until 1310, and there was no bus. We asked a lady who was waiting at the bus stop to translate the schedule for us, and as I guessed, the bus we wanted was the one that left twenty minutes ago, and the bus that the lifelong learners were waiting for wasn’t going to come until 1505… We decided that we weren’t going to wait and take the hour long train ride back. The train goes fast, but it is all the transfers that take so long (also one or two wrong trains may have been taken again). We finally arrived back in Kobe a little after 1400 where, for the first time, the group split up. Candice, Kayleigh, and Rory wanted to go back to the ship, get their laptops, and go look for some internet while Eric, Carly, and I wanted to walk around Kobe. It was our last day and we had to be back on the ship by 1800 so we didn’t have very much time. We decided to just walk around the vicinity of the train station, which was where all the main downtown shopping was. We decided to take mostly the back roads and tried to stay away from the touristy areas and we finally stumbled across a (we believe) Shinto temple. It was beautiful and intricate wooden building painted bright red with gold linings. We saw a few people praying and reading from books in the main room and after exploring the outside, we went back to the main streets and slowly meandered back to the subway station. I had some leftover Yen so I bought some snacks to bring back to the ship. I boarded the ship around 1700 and spent the rest of the evening talking to people about their Japan trips and fell asleep pretty early.

We are actually arriving in Shanghai, China tomorrow. The past two days on the ship have flown by and have been filled with school, reading, papers, and writing this blog. Now I apologize for any typos and confusing sentences because I have not and will not have time to go back and proofread this, but I don’t think it’s too bad. We are arriving in Shanghai at 0800 tomorrow and will probably be allowed to get off around 0900. We are spending a week in China and I will update this again after that!