Monday, February 18, 2013

1/29—Day 3 Tokyo, Japan



After an amazing night/morning with the 5 University of Tokyo students, we stopped at McDonalds. We finally made it back to our hotel room around 5:30 am… We all just want to take in every moment of this trip and with it being the first port; I think everyone got a little carried away with trying to experience Japan. Even with it being such a late night, it was completely worth every minute.
By this point, I was back to my regular “on ship” group of people. As much as I wanted to meet new people while traveling, I’m glad I ended up with my regular group of friends. Even though we were all running on 2 hours of sleep, we were able to travel through the city a lot easier. We stopped at a Starbucks and having to suck up being tried so I could enjoy today, I drank my first cup of coffee. I struggled through it since I hate coffee, but it helped me get through the day for sure! Two SAS girls that Justin had been traveling with met up with us and we all headed to Tokyo Disneyland!
Justin took charge of getting us through the metro station, and we made it to Disneyland without any problems. I have definitely started to learn my traveling style over the past few days… I can’t figure out the T in Boston, so I knew there was no hope in trying to figure it out in Japan. I basically follow someone who knows what they are doing and hope we don’t get lost!
Disneyland never gets old… So today was a really fun and relaxing. As we walked into the park, we were able to see Mt. Fuji in the distance. As you can imagine, Disney was basically the same as it is in the U.S., but being able to see Mt. Fuji really changed the experience for me. People in Japan LOVE Disney, so everyone had Disney hats and Mickey Mouse ears. I don’t remember it ever being like that at home… but maybe I was just more aware of my surroundings since I was looking for cultural differences. For the most part, everything was the same… the rides were in Japanese and the parade was a little different. Basically everyone in the park stopped what they were doing and laid out picnic blankets to watch the parade.
If I had to pick my favorite part about going to Disney today, I would have to say it was the It’s A Small World After All ride. Though the ride is kind of long and hearing “it’s a small world after all” over and over again gets a little annoying, I thought it was awesome to see all the different countries. Especially since a lot of the countries I will be heading to! Andrea and I were trying to figure out what all the countries were and which ones we are going to. It will be interesting to go through my videos of the ride once I’m home to see if the way Disney portrays each country is actually how they are.
We spent majority of the day at Disney and if we weren’t all so exhausted, we probably would have stayed later. We headed back to the city and decided on what the plan was. Since our next port is Kobe, Japan, SAS gave us the option of traveling overland, which is what most people decided to do. We found an overnight bus that would get us to Kyoto by the morning. This was the plan for majority of students, so we ran into a lot of people that night. We had a couple of hours to kill before getting on the bus, so we grab dinner and the headed to 7 eleven. We stocked up on some snack food for our 6-hour bus ride and then we headed to a small restaurant for drinks. While we waited, we reflected on the trip this far and what we planned on doing differently in China.

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