This blog was originally created to chronicle my time spent in Japan, and while it still does, I plan on slowly changing it to show my passions, thoughts, and ideas about various topics on the internet.
I am sorry I have not posted more about my amazing time in Japan. My computer has decided to take a massive shit on me and has been turning off randomly. I think I have tried to write this post at least a dozen times!!!
It is friday night and I went to karaoke!! Then I went to a club called Plan B (hahahahahaha) then a bar called 68! At club 68 they have an active Beer Pong table which I excelled at! Gotta represent the US! I have posted about 98 pictures on my "Picasa Photo Album" available to your right. --------------------->
I am currently I tad bit intoxicated...but that is okay since my computer seems to want to work right now! I hope you enjoy the pictures I have provided and I intend to upload quite a bit more in the futre.
Everyone should experience Japan at least once in their lives. The people here are so nice, kind, helpful, and honest at first glance. It is quite a bit refreshing from people in the US.
I hope everyone who reads this enjoys all of the pictures I have provided and I hope you stay tuned for more posts in the future! This has been a post with a record number of exclamation marks! You will just have to deal with it.
Until next time...the song of the day. :D Good luck to Skrillex who is currently dating her. I hope you keep this one, since she is most certainly a keeper.
I have still had trouble finding wifi so I will not be able to upload pictures until tomorrow. I have a plethora of content to share with everyone so I hope you all stay patient!
Yesterday I spent the entire day with my host family (who still need proper introduction in their own update). We went to a very important Japanese monument called the Miki Coal Mine. This area is almost sacred to many Japanese people living in Kyushu (the southern most island) because of its nomination as a world heritage site. This was the largest coal mine in Japan in the early 20th century and provided the resources for Japan to grow as an industrial power.
After visiting the coal mine my host family took me to a town called the "village of rivers." Basically a Japanese Venice. My family and I took a boat ride through the city where we were shown a lot of the towns significant monuments. My personal favorite was the home of an ancient samurai family that has held to its traditions and still practices the "art of the sword" to this day. After taking the boat trip across the city we had to walk back across to get to our car. I'd say we walked about 10 miles through the town.
The next day (today) we visited the 3rd largest castle in all of Japan, learned to make noodles (which we then ate!), and visited an active volcano! Pretty busy day!
I will talk about the castle and the volcano much more in my next post when I have pictures to back up what I say. For instance, I snuck up on a ninja....twice! Owned.
Here is a post with several pictures of my time here. There will be a LOT more pictures in a few days as soon as I can get wifi for my phone to upload all the pictures I took today, as well as a few videos of modern day samurai slicing stuff up.
Today I visisted an amazing temple up in a Japanese mountain, then I went to a Katana Swordsmith's workshop and learned how to make a Katana. I was then shows a demonstration of just how sharp these Katana are by the several trained "modern samurai." I was then able to wear a sword and swing it a bit. (Pictures to follow tomorrow.) I will also give a much longer description tomorrow when I have the time as well as the pictures to go with it.
I will also be doing an update regarding the host family I have been staying with. They are completely awesome and I feel they deserve a post entirely to themselves, so when I have the appropriate pictures I will create a post just for them.
Here come the pictures.
This is what the 777 jet looked like that I took. I loved this flight.
This was a sign at the airport depicting the bus routes. Think you could navigate them?
I am not exactly sure what this is, but it looked cool and I felt it was picture worthy. Don't you agree?
That about wraps up what pictures I was able to upload from my phone. I will upload quite a bit more the next time I can get reliable wifi on my phone!
Well my future loyal viewers do I have a few stories for you! Currently where I am it is March 22 and 1:41 in the AM. Where YOU are it is 11:41AM on the 21st. I am officially in the future.
So this entry is going to be extremely long because I experienced a lot of crazy stuff today. There are very few pictures to upload since my phone has yet been able to connect to any sort of WiFi...a bummer I know.
So my journey starts at my house in Houston when I wake up early and get ready only to learn that mother nature is about to open a can of whoop ass on Houston. I felt that mother nature can't hold me back so my father and I left the house without a care in the world about what the weather may bring.
So about 4 minutes later we end up getting stuck behind the longest train ever created. We left my house at 7:01am and did not get 3 miles from my house by 7:30 due to this ridiculously long, and extremely slow train. I have not gotten stuck behind a train in literally years. I almost forgot that trains still existed and railroad tracks weren't old ruins from a lost age. Well it turns out trains still exist and to make up for their scarcity they add a million cars onto them. So.Stupid.
So we bypass the train and continue on our journey across the city of Houston towards Hobby Airport. Well, had the train never showed up I doubt I would have seen any bad weather at all. But, the train did happen, and it happened so spectacularly that not only did the storm have the chance to catch up with us, it had the chance to get far enough ahead of us that most of our drive was through monsoon winds from hell. I remember vividly driving over an overpass and the wind picked up so much that it caused the rain to literally fall horizontally. Every car on the overpass had to stop for fear of veering into other lanes. At this EXACT moment the lovely weather service decided to tell us there was a tornado warning for central Harris County. At this point I thought "Well damn, nature doesn't want to me to leave the states SO BAD that it throws tornadoes at me. Well we showed mother nature up and eluded her vortexes of destruction and made it to the airport.
Upon arriving at the airport I went through all the security just fine, but when I got to my gate it showed that my flight had been delayed 15 minutes. No big deal. Mind you the flight was supposed to take off at 10:15...arrive at 11:00 which would allow me an hour and a half to make my international flight. Well 15 minutes goes by and I notice it has been delayed another 15 minutes. So now it is departing at 10:45 instead of 10:15. Still no big deal. We all get boarded on the plan by 11:00. I am STILL not worried. THE PLANE DOESN'T TAKE OFF UNTIL 11:55! Because of the weather it took the pilots an entire hour to download the new route they had to take. Now this made me think. If the pilots have to download the route information "for" the computer, they aren't technically pilots. If they let the plane fly itself the whole way and make sure nothing breaks, they are more like hardware supervisors. Silly stuff...anyway, long story short my plan arrives at 12:40, I beast my way to my gate and arrive at 12:45...the EXACT minute the plane was supposed to leave.
This flight was delayed until 1:30. I'm not entirely sure if this made me happy or irritated me further. That part of my day was a blur of emotions and running. I finally board this mega jet and discover that I have a window seat, as well as a free seat next to me to stretch out on, SCORE! The next 13 hours were blissfully peaceful and awesome. I was provided 3 delicious meals and was able to sleep for hours. Best flight ever.
My super jet arrives in Tokyo Narita and I get my first splash of Japanese culture. In a nutshell, everyone is super polite, super helpful, and super giggly when I try to speak Japanese to them. So here I am in a country that has too many crazy symbols in their grammar for me to read anything, but EVERY sign has English on it too! This makes it really easy for me to check my bag, get my new boarding pass, and find my new gate. My final flight to the area of Japan I will be living was not exciting at all. Everyone was Japanese, super polite, and super giggly at my attempts at their language. The flight attendants were AWESOME though, they gave me a menu with a lot of pictures and all I had to do was point at what I wanted. To make things even better, they did the same thing to everyone else around me, even though everyone around me could read the menu! Hahaha...awesome.
This is where the story gets interesting...seriously.
The problem is that after having to quickly reschedule my flight at the last minute, I ended up arriving a half day too early. I originally planned on just hanging out in the International section of the airport until I met up with the others in my party. Well there is a shuttle that takes people from the domestic terminal to the international terminal which takes about 15 minutes. When I get to the international terminal all the doors are closed and the lights are out. At this point I am simply thinking wtf. I hop back on the shuttle and go back to domestic to hang out there over night. IN THE 30 MINUTES I WAS GONE THEY LOCKED THAT UP TOO. So now I am stuck out in the 40 degree weather with nowhere to go and no idea how to get there.
I decided this was the ultimate moment to brush up on my Japanese speaking skills. I go over to the nearest cab driver and ask him where I can find a cheap hotel for the night. Somewhere in the translation he directs me to a 24 hour restaurant a few blocks from the airport that you can supposedly stay the night at for 500 yen, which is about 6 dollars. I'm thinking "hell yeah great deal!" Well it turns out that this 24 hour restaurant is just a restaurant and I was told I was not allowed to sleep at the tables. I ordered food anyway and enjoyed it. Then I explained my situation to my awesome waitress who seriously took the time to 1) call me a cab and 2) call a hotel securing me a room. This lady spoke absolutely no English, but my broken Japanese combined with my awesome sherades skills told her everything she needed to know. In what might have been 35 seconds a cab driver dressed in a tuxedo peeks his head in and bows to me and asks if I still want the taxi. He then proceeds to take all my bags down to the taxi while I paid my awesome waitress and thanked her a hundred times. My cab driver, who knew I didn't have a lot of yen, speeds through the city to my hotel in probably about a minute in a half making what would have been a $16 cab right about a $10 dollar cab ride.
After dropping me off this cab driver sets up a time to pick me up in the morning so he can take me back to the airport! I love the Japanese. So I then go into the hotel and secure a room. The concierge laughed at my Japanese more than anyone else and showed off her perfect English. I get my room key, go up to my room and spend the next 15 minutes trying to figure out how to turn on the damn lights! Turns out there is a holder for your room key near the door that activates all of lights. Nifty trick Japan, nifty trick.
I hope you enjoyed spending the last 45 minutes of your life reading this short story. Hope you enjoyed it because the best is yet to come! Once I figure out the cell phone situation I will upload more pictures!
Well it is my last day in America. Pretty exciting stuff if you ask me... This time around I am going to experiment with adding pictures to the post, since I plan on changing the layout soon to make it much cooler to view.
This past week was spring break for most Universities, and like any normal college student I rented a beach house with several friends to enjoy my last full week in the States.
This is the view from our porch; pretty awesome eh!? It was a fun week that I will not be speaking about on any sort of public forum such as this!
The next few days are going to be pretty exciting as I experience Japan for the first time and begin to get adjusted. I will be making a LOT more updates in the next few days so keep looking for new content! I am also very much considering making a video post for people to laugh at. I am thinking something along the lines of "Airport Shenanigans?"
Let me know what you think in the comments below. I am going to open up comments for everyone as a trial. You will be able to post anonymously, so don't abuse the lack of comment security or I will remove it.
Well it seems that I am leaving two days sooner than expected! There was a miscommunication about the exact day I needed to arrive, which has caused me to change my flight so that I leave on March 20th and arrive on March 21st.
The realization that I will no longer be in America in 4 days has really started to hit me, as well as hit my parents. Things are moving a mile a minute here in Houston and I can't wait until all the preparations are finished and I can finally relax on that 14 hour flight.
If you have any questions for me post them in the comments below and I will answer them during the next update.
And with that I leave you with the song of the day!
Hello everyone reading, which is probably no one right now since this is my brand new blog! I will be updating this bad boy on a pretty regular basis throughout my trip to Japan and beyond. I have heard that most people who study abroad say that they will update their blogs constantly, but fail to do so due to lack of interest. This will NOT be the case with me. I am determined to provide everyone that is interested in my trip with quality updates on a regular basis! They will be entertaining as well.
After each blog entry I will provide a "song of the day" to spice things up. I may also include youtube videos that I have found entertaining, or maybe I'll record videos of myself to upload here. We will just see how things pan out.
Here is the first song of the day by good old Jason Mraz.
