I have so many things I want to say about Japan that I hardly know where to start or how to organize them. We had a phenomenal trip. It was so much fun to be so lost, confused, and out of touch with the world around me. It’s maddening to look at writing and not have a chance of figuring out what it says, or how to pronounce it, or even being able to recognize it when you see it again. It’s thrilling to find your way around despite all this, and it’s so rewarding to experience a new culture first-hand. (If you can’t tell, I’m a big fan of traveling, and a big fan of Japan.)
While in Tokyo, we stayed with our good friend and amazing host, Yuji. We have him and his charming girlfriend, Tomoko, to thank for a whole lot of the amazing experiences we had during our stay. Pretty much all the other amazing experiences we had were thanks to the help of another good friend, Sachiko, who made about a gazillion phone calls from London to Japan so that we could do a lot of cool things (like spend the night at a temple) in Kyoto. Thank you guys so, so much for making this the best darn trip to Japan we ever took. (OK, so it’s the only trip we’ve ever taken to Japan, but had we taken other trips in the past, this one would have beaten them all hands down.)
Some of my first impressions of Japan, which came to me during a jetlag-induced haze, were how many things it offered that I liked about Switzerland and that I missed about the US. It was as if Japan had picked my favorite parts of the two other cultures, improved upon those, and incorporated them into its own. As examples:
From Switzerland:
- Clean, efficient public transportation
- Low crime
- No tipping (even better than in Switzerland, where there is minimal tipping)
- Pedestrian-friendly
- Friendly, helpful people in places like tourist information booths, train ticket counters, etc.
- Shockingly clean cities
From the US:
- Excellent customer service, attentive waiters
- 24-hour stores, grocery shopping after 8pm and (gasp!) on Sundays
- Affordable take-out food (despite rumors to the contrary, Tokyo was delightfully affordable all around)
- Free, unlimited ice water in restaurants
- No wasting time trying to flag a waiter down so you can get the check at a restaurant (you just pay at the front on your way out)
- Ubiquitous air conditioning
- Ice sold by the bag in grocery stores (in case you can’t tell, I really miss ice)
More tragically profound posts about Japan coming up soon. So far in the works I have for you:
- Tokyo;
- Eating in Japan;
- Drinking in Japan: when ‘no no no’ means ‘pour me some more beeroo, fool’;
- Novel ways to entertain yourself in Tokyo;
- Ohara, or how we learned to read kanji in a day;
- Things you should never name a beverage;
- Bedhopping in Kyoto;
- Nara, or How to make Japanese schoolgirls giggle;
- Staying in traditional Japanese inns, or No way in hell am I getting into that dirty bathwater;
…and a couple others. OK, don’t worry, I probably won’t ever get around to writing a lot of those. Just the really, really important ones. Stay tuned.