Japan Trip No.1

Of many… hopefully 🙂

Last Tuesday at 11:50am, we took off in a plane to Japan. This Wednesday at 11:00am we landed back in the US.

Going to Japan was an amazing experience; here are some highlights:

Their streets are quite different. They drive on the other side of the road, the street signs are different and are almost all graphical instead of words. The widest road they have is maybe 3 lanes and that’s REALLY big for them, their freeways are usually only 2 lanes on each side. Bad traffic for them… well I’d consider my self really lucky if I had that kind of traffic on my way home from LA in the afternoon. Many of the cross walks are huge! At one very busy road, we noticed that the ENTIRE intersection was one BIG crosswalk.

The little orange car was taken for Casey 🙂 I think it was also the only orange car we saw. The most popular color of car to buy in Japan is white.

We call the car in the upper right Tuffy’s Japanese cousin 🙂 doesn’t he kinda look like Tuffy?

🙂 even their trucks and vans are small and round faced!

We found some really awesome guitar picks that were in the shape and design of two of the most used road signs. We bought them for a friend, then went scavenger hunting to take pictures of said signs in action.

We went to the amaaaazing Puroland!

It’s almost better than going to Disneyland. It’s a 4 story indoor theme park all for Sanrio cuteness 🙂 Every inch of the place is decorated, even more detailed than Disneyland rides! How can I say this?

Even the BATHROOMS are themed! I only went to two of them, but they were decorated to the theme of the area they were in. From the floors to the cieling, to the stalls, even the sinks were decorated differently! You can’t tell from this picture, but there’s a 3-D piano key ribbon on the cieling and above the stalls are little houses, each one different!

Other than that, we got to ride a pirate ship, look at old temples that are amazingly engineered, eat black eggs that supposedly give you 7 more years to live per egg you eat, eat kobe beef (OH MAN), go walking through the streets of Japan, ride on the famous bullet train that travels up to 200 mph, stay in 5 star hotels including one where you can control the window curtains and music in the bathroom from your bead, try out the famous Japanese hot springs, and eat sashimi and other parts of the Japanese cuisine (I love Japanese food SO much I’d never get sick of it)

This is just a random picture of one of the signs I found extremely funny.

This was found in one of the “Western” toilet stalls. I guess it makes sense, if you were used to using the “squatting” toilets, this contraption could easily be very confusing.

I guess it could also be very confusing for some one who has never seen one of their toilets.

I also got to feed a deer!

and I found out that their antlers are fuzzy… they also eat paper and plastic though I doubt that that’s good for them.

We saw a million and 1 cute key chains, plushies, and the like. It’s amazing how many cute characters the Japanese can think of. They literally have a character for everything! Every sign you see on the road, every store you encounter, they probably have some type of small character associated with them (you can imagine then how plain and boring it felt to come back and see signs without cute pictures) They had a dog character for the customs area of the airport and a little guy wearing a cape and airplane goggles everywhere else in the airport.

Of course, we bought a few cuties ourselves, but definately our favorites would be Capi, Tochigi-san (named after our tour’s bus driver), and Kaeru-san

and THAT was our Japan trip

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