The night bus dropped us off at Shinagawa station in Tokyo. We immediately found the subway and took it to Harajuku. We hadn’t known where we wanted to go first, and though a nice woman tried to help us, we didn’t know enough of each other’s language to communicate well enough and eventually went somewhere that sounded familiar from one of the preport meetings. As we were told in preport, this is where all of the “hip youngsters” hung out. I didn’t see many, though there was one guy who had green hair. He looked pretty hip. We walked around for a bit before finally stopping in a coffee shop for something to eat.
We checked out the map outside the coffee shop and noticed that we had walked in the complete wrong direction and weren’t anywhere near Harajuku, so we started back. Then we went the wrong direction again. I don’t know why, but I don’t seem to be able to read maps in Japan at all. I promise I am not usually this directionally challenged. Eventually we got back to Harajuku. It was a shopping street that was full of people, even though the shops weren’t all open yet. We walked around looking in the windows of the shops before we found a giant shrine called Meiji Jingo. It was a very big shrine with large paths through the woods. Inside we found a museum about the Red Cross and the Empress. Since we couldn’t read much at the museum, we didn’t stay long before heading back to the subway and went to another stop.
For lunch we stopped at a conveyor belt sushi restaurant, also known as Kaiten sushi or a sushi-go-round. This was definitely my favorite type of restaurant that I had been to in Japan. They had a conveyor belt with sushi on it that circled the room. Different types of sushi were placed on colored plates and the price was classified by the color of the plates.
We had a few hours before we needed to get to the baseball stadium, so we headed to Edo Castle. The gates were blocked, so we couldn’t get close enough to really see the castle, but there were some cherry blossom trees and a river that we could take some pictures of. We walked around for a little while before taking the subway to the Tokyo Dome to buy tickets for the baseball game.
Josh needed to get a phone card for an interview the next morning so we needed to find a phone store. We asked a crossing guard where we could find a store and she said she would take us to one, which was about a 20 minute walk away. Instead, a college student named Yuki introduced himself and said he would take us there so the crossing guard didn’t have to. Yuki was planning to move to the US to study abroad in Engineering in the next couple of years. He took us to the store and spoke to the people at the store for us. It turned out we wouldn’t be able to get Josh’s phone to work, so he would have to just wait until we got back to the ship.
Yuki said goodbye and we headed back to the Tokyo Dome. The game was going to start soon. Before the game started, we took turns getting something to eat from the stands. I went to one place and ordered by pointing to a picture of something that looked good. It turned out to be kimchi, which I think is actually Korean. Joe said he hated it and it smelled terrible, but I didn’t think it was that bad. The only thing that worried me was that I wasn’t sure what kind of meat came with the kimchi. Whatever it was tasted pretty good.
The game was between the home team, the Giants, and the visitors, the Dragons. Baseball is huge in Japan. The crowd makes up special cheers for their teams and everyone gets really excited about the game. The home team won!
After the game we headed back to the subway. Our hostel was somewhere in Yokohama and it was about an hour and a half long subway ride to get there. Then we got off at the wrong station and had to get back on. Then we walked in the wrong direction for a while and then had to walk about. Eventually we found it.
It was probably around 11pm when we found Hostel A Silk Tree. It was a pretty cool hostel. I got my own room. It was smaller than my ship cabin and basically just had a bed roll to sleep on. The hostel had a rooftop garden that I really wanted to see, but it wasn’t open during the times I was there. I went to bed pretty quickly since we had to be up early the next morning.
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