Arrival

This is a quick one, with no pictures, but there is plenty still to come.

We left SFO on Wednesday at noon, arriving in Narita Airport near Tokyo at 11 pm. The flight was not too bad and the food on ANA was actually good!

We took the train from NRT to Ueno (the neighborhood where we are staying in Tokyo for the first two nights), which took about an hour. Our hotel is right next to Ueno Park, which is a huge tropical forest looking park with tons of great statues and shrines inside. It is so green here and it is not what I expected Tokyo to look like at all. Yesterday (which was Thursday for us and right now it is Fri. morning), we went to the oldest and biggest Buddhist temple in Tokyo. They had a really cool 5-story pagoda and it was this gigantic sprawling complex with all kinds of cool Shinto shrines. When we got back to the hotel, we visited the Onsen here, which is the Japanese public bath/hot springs. That was a lot of fun and very relaxing.

So far, food has not been a problem for us. The first night we at a place called the Full Length Table, in Ueno. They made us vegetarian spaghetti (Japanese-style) and we drank the smoothest sake ever! For breakfast, the hotel is serving us a traditional Japanese breakfast (Miso soup, rice, and weird sea vegetables), along with two fried eggs. Yesterday for lunch we had Soba, which was really good.

Overall, it is hard to believe that this is really happening... that our lives will be like this for 8 months. We have not had any problems communicating or taking the Tokyo metro. It has been painless, except for ordering the Soba noodles yesterday, but we eventually figured it out.

Okay, gotta go, but expect pictures next time!

-Mike.