Yes we are here. It only took us the loss of a whole day but we are here and the trip has officially begun. Things got off to a bad start when my watch broken in the hotel in Phoenix the night before. Granted it was circa 1990 but still, the first day you dont want stuff breaking already. After getting up at 4 am in Phoenix we took the first past of the trip to San Fran. Short flight and we slept most of it. 2 hour layover in San Francisco before we boarded the baby express for Tokyo. While our seats were not uncomfortable we did have about 5 babies within 5 rows of us. One directly across from Justin was quite taken with him and stared forever. But she never cried the entire time and was damn cute so we had no problems with her. In fact almost all the babies were well behaved even the one that looked like an orangaton (he had spikey hair and a round little face). Our bad luck continued when Justins pen exploded on me when I tried to fill out the customs form. We started to get a little nervous. It was Friday the 13th after all (Justin beat you all saying happy birthday when we passed the international date line).
10 hours, 4 bad movies and little sleep later we landed in Tokyo. Customs was a breeze, so was getting the train ticket into town. It was a 55 minute train ride down to our stop, then onto the metro for 2 stops, then a half mile walk down the road to the hostel. We were pretty beat at this time having been up almost 24 hours and were looking forward to a comfy stay on a nice bed. Instead we got a tradition Japanese room with what amounts to ground pads for beds, sandbags for pillows and doorways that arent tall enough for us to fit through. It was at this time that we started really wondering what the hell we have gotten ourselves into. We contemplated switching to a nicer hotel but realized this trip is all about the experience and decided to stay. We werent quite ready to get to adventurous so we had McDonalds for dinner. On the way back from dinner we passed what seemed to be some sort of street celebration. It was about 100 people walking down the street chanting and carrying a shrine of some sort. Most of the guys had on traiditional Japanese jackets and sumo wrestler kind of diapers. It was odd but kind of neat to see (not the underwear part). After we got back to the room we crashed on the ground pads with our mission of staying up until 8 accomplished (this should help us adjust to the time difference).
So now it is 5 am local time. We are sticky from the humidity, dirty from wearing the same clothes and sitting at the free internet terminal in the hostel. But we have started and so far it has not been boring. Pictures to come once I can find a place to upload them.
