Japan - Day 6 (Osaka)

We woke up, went to the airport, and flew to Osaka!!!

Osaka is a very beautiful city, and although we totally loved Tokyo, we were excited to explore a new place. We got to Osaka and went to the Osaka castle.

We were going to hike up to it....but we decided we were going to Himeji to see the best castle in Japan the next day, and we could see it pretty well from a distance, so we decided to just take photos from down below.

Lei and I asked some girl to take a photo of us with the castle, and somehow all she got was a tree:

This picture could literally have been taken anywhere.

So we had Anna take another one for us where you can actually see the castle. I promise it looked bigger/closer in person:

It was a hot day. We went over to Charles' house (a good friend that I met at the World Scout Jamboree) and he had a left a key for us there. It turns out he told us the wrong way to turn the key though and it was almost impossible for us to get into his house. We were pretty frustrated with the door (which he had mentioned was a bit hard to open), until finally we got him on the phone and got in.

Reuniting with Charles was great and I'm really grateful for him and the friendship we still have between us.

Japan - Day 5 (Shinjuku and back to Narita)

Today was AMAZING. First we met up with our German friends (Robert and Rafael McStan) and our new friend from YSA (Christopher Sannar), and then we went to go eat lunch.

We yelped a high-rated ramen place for lunch and it turns out it has won all kinds of awards for being the best ramen place! I thought it was super good and when we left the line was crazy long.

We went to the top of the Tokyo Metro Building for an awesome free view of the city. As far as you could see out it was all buildings! So cool.

Next we wandered back to the station and on the way stopped at an electronics store to get free massages. Actually, on our way to the electronics store we were joking around, having a good time, and we walked across a bridge that started to rock while we walked on it! So we started sort of jumping up and down because we thought it was funny that the bridge was actually swaying just from us! It actually didn't really seem to work when we jumped though.

Later, we found out that it was actually from an EARTHQUAKE! Hahaha. So that was a fun, harmless little earthquake for us.

It's hard to capture in words what a fun day it was, but it was awesome and you can see a lot of it in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufm0RwSOZSE

At the end of the day we went to Narita to our hostel we would stay at that night. We did some laundry, biked around on the free bikes, and had dinner with our new friend Ravi that we met when we got picked up at the airport on our way to the hostel.

Japan - Day 4 (Church, Temple, FHE)

Sunday. The day of rest, and we sure felt like we needed it! It was a really fantastic day, as I guess you should be able to expect!

We went to church in the morning and made a lot of new friends there. We got invited to YSA FHE for lunch and Filipino FHE for dinner! We were so happy about it. 

Anna made a new friend and she helped us get over to the Tokyo temple. She was a lot of fun. She spoke Japanese to us half the time and kept reassuring us that she would help us get to the right place. 

We....had our doubts, but she ended up getting us there! 

The Tokyo temple is very beautiful. It is right next to a big park and even though it doesn't really have temple grounds it has nice plants all around it. 

YSA FHE was hosted by the Quinn family. They're totally great. Brother Quinn gave us a ton of advice about personal finances and offered us his contact info if we ever want to discuss some stuff with him. His wife was really nice too and she reminded me of the girl in the TV show Arrow that is kind of the brains behind the main superhero. She seemed really nice and really smart. 

We met a lot of cool people and made some fun new friends. 

After that we headed over to Filipino FHE at the Magalei's house. I can't believe I didn't get a photo with them!! Anyway, we played some fun games, had a nice lesson and we ate tons of great food. We also met a really cool guy named Marcus Otsuji. He and his wife both served in the same mission in Japan (at different times) and they've been living in Japan for over ten years! He works for Apple which I think it super cool. 

What a great day. At the end of the night we passed by this cute little park on our way home. 

Japan - Day 3 (Meiji Shrine, Harajuku, Shibuya)

Today we had a very full day! First we got up and went to go meet a couple of new friends: Robert and Rafael.

They are from Germany and they are visiting Japan for 10 days. They were a lot of fun and surprisingly full of energy for having just arrived the night before.

Rafael is a YouTube star! He has over 100,000 subscribers and makes workout videos. I totally would love to start using them when I work out, but unfortunately they’re in German. So if any of my old friends from Bosch want to get in shape, they should check out his videos.

https://www.youtube.com/user/infitnesstv

After meeting up with them it was time for brunch! Trevor brought us to the best udon place you can find. They have massive bowls of udon and will give you up to 1.5 or even double portion all for the same price! Naturally I had to go for the double portion and I’m happy to say that I finished it. It was delicious and kept me going for almost the whole rest of the day.

After udon we headed over to Nogi’s shrine. He was the general for the emperor Meiji and as soon as Meiji died he slit his wife’s throat and committed suicide himself.

Anna contemplating her life

It’s actually a really popular place for people to get married…I don’t really understand the logic behind that, but I also don’t understand why he had to commit suicide so I guess it’s just a really different way of thinking about things.

We had fun though! Next we went to Yoyogi park and the Meiji shrine. We had a nice stroll through the wide, gravel road under the shade of massive trees. The actual shrine wasn’t the most impressive to me, but it was fun to chat and see people along the way.

Speaking of people watching, we got a really great taste of it next in Harajuku. Harajuku is where all the young people in Tokyo hang out and where you can really see all their fashion. It’s so fun! We split off from Trevor, Robert, and Rafael so they could go to Senso-ji and we could head to Shibuya.

When we walked back through Takeshita Dori we tried some of the crepes they were known for and did a little shopping. Although none of us bought anything, I think we were all pretty tempted to. They had suits in every color of the rainbow! I love that. I’ll have to come back again someday when I have some money.

Shibuya! We went to the Shibuya crossing, and saw Hachiko's statue. Hachiko is a famous dog because he would go to the station to meet his owner every day after work. After his owner passed away he kept going back to the station every day to wait for him for many years. 

That’s it. We went home and went to bed.

Japan - Day 2 (Narita and…Anna!!!)

We started off the day with going for that stroll we wanted to go on around Yotsukaido. It was very nice. Walking around Japan definitely feels like you’re walking around in an anime half the time, and there are also no shortage of great characters for your show.

Keiko came with us and took us to visit an old person’s home in the neighborhood. It was very nice. The workers there prepared beautiful, fresh flowers to set out on the table that were from their own garden. The entire place was actually made from a normal home, which gave it a really nice vibe. I would love to live there when I’m old! But then again, I would love to live in Japan any time.

After visiting the old person’s home we walked back to the house, passing through forests and rice fields along the way. As you can see, Japan is a very beautiful country.
Lei and I then headed off to Narita where we would visit a temple and then go meet Anna at the airport.

Now it was time to pick up Anna!!! We were so excited to see her!! The first two minutes of seeing her were great, and then right after that we were all too exhausted to function. Anna had just come off an eight hour flight, and Lei and I had been awake since 4:30AM. Jetlag is very real.

We hopped on a train to Asakusa to visit the Senso-ji temple. This is a very famous temple in Tokyo and so of course we needed to go check it out.

We got some good photos, but we actually were unable to get the best one at the dumpling shop.
After visiting the temple we decided we really needed to get a little bite to eat. We walked around and Lei and I found some food we thought looked pretty good. Anna wasn’t into that, and she found something that she would love:

Fried chicken!!

Unfortunately for her, even though the sign said open, the shop was decidely closed.
We walked around some more and decided to go in search of dumplings. Dumplings are really more chinese food, but last time Anna was in Asia she visited China. We all speak zero to no Japanese and it seems like most Japanese don’t speak a ton of English, but we were able to communicate with one guy that we wanted gyoza (dumplings).

Us - “Hi, do you have dumplings?"

Him - “Uhhhh…"

Us - “Somebody look up dumplings"

“ugh, I should know this"

“My internet is being slow"

“OH! It’s gyoza. Duh! I knew that"

Him - “Gyoza….."

(he wasn’t super helpful"

Us - “Gyoza wa doko desuka?"

Him - “Go…and turn left! no!….go..straight! And you see tiger. Tiger gyoza”

Anna - “Mahalo!"

We never saw a tiger (we still have doubts about whether there really was one), but somehow we were able to find a gyoza shop.

We were so happy. We each decided to get six gyoza and got a little help ordring from an old Japanese couple that was sitting next to us. As they were about to leave they told us that they would cover our bill! We were very happily surprised and they told us “Welcome to Japan” (They said it in Japanese first but we didn’t understand).

We asked them if we could take a photo together, but the woman quickly said “No Photo!” and bolted out the door. hahaha.

After getting our gyoza we headed to Seiko to meet up with Trevor (an old friend that Mike and I stayed with before) and went to eat dinner.

Dinner. was. amazing.

We had tonkatsu and I think it was the best I’ve ever had. One thing that I really loved is that we actually crushed our own sesame seeds and put it in the katsu sauce.

After eating we were completely exhausted and welcomed a solid night of sleep. 

Japan - Day 1 (Yotsukaido)

This is it! For the next month or so we’re going to be traveling throughout Asia on our Epic Asia Trip. We’re going to see some family, lots of old friends, and make tons of new ones! I’m stoked out of my mind right now!

Things couldn’t have worked out better for the flight over. We got to sit next to each other with an empty seat in-between us, which really meant that we got to spread out, get comfortable, and get some sleep on the flight. Like always, I got pretty hungry, but fortunately mom packed me some hard-boiled eggs to keep me going.

We got to Narita Airport more than half an hour early and we met up with Keiko. She had a sign for us!! (Mr. Ray Banks), but we either arrived too  early or walked right past it.

After we got to the house we had a few hours before it would be dinner time. We definitely wanted to go check some things out! We went to tell Keiko that we wanted to go walk around the neighborhood a bit, but she had a way better idea. She said because we’re both “challengers” we would probably want to go do something like….ONSEN!

Unfortunately (or I suppose fortunately) we don’t have any pictures of going to the onsen. Oh! So onsen are hot springs. This is my third visit to Japan and somehow I have never been to the before!! (What was I thinking??? They’re amazing!) Anyway, let me walk you through the experience.

First, we went in and Keiko explained a little to us about how it would all work. You separate into men and women, you go into the locker room, you take off all your clothes, and then you go enjoy the onsen.

I thought that all sounded good until I walked into look and was like..uh…these guys are really naked. hahaha. But once I actually went in it only took a minute or two to get over that because everyone else in there is totally over it.

There were all sorts of different tubs with ones with hot water, very cold water, CO2 water, electrified water (although I think this may be only the girls side because I never found it), and a couple of saunas.

The first tub I hopped into looked pretty innocent, just bubbles, but when I sat down I noticed a weird pain in my lower back. Actually, my whole body started to feel pretty strange, and I remembered Keiko saying something about an "electric bath" where they run electric currents through the water! I looked at the sign next to the tub, and sure enough, there was a picture of a stick figure being shocked by underwater voltages. What a crazy thing. All of the other tubs were very relaxing and nice though, and I think it's safe to say that I'm pretty obsessed with onsens now. There's something great about the culture of acceptance that's prevalent at onsens, at first I got a few curious looks for my distinct non-Japanese appearance, but mostly everyone just ignored each other and enjoyed themselves without being weird about anything. 

My favorite was…lying out on the wood outside. That was actually really fantastic. I also enjoyed the massaging water, and I loved the saunas. One sauna had salt that you could use to rub all over your body (to exfoliate). That was great. The other had sumo wrestling on TV!! My first time ever watching sumo wrestling and it was hanging out with a bunch of naked, old Japanese men together in a sauna.

To sum it up: we are now huge fans of onsen.

Dinner was fantastic. Keiko prepared something using potato-based noodles that was delicious, she made salad with a soy sauce-based dressing, she bought us sushi, and she even offered us….NATTO!!!
Natto is super weird. It’s smelly, full of very sticky beans? and it does not taste good. I had to try some because earlier I said I would, and it actually wasn’t as bad as I thought. Maybe it’s because last summer I finally started eating stinky tofu? Keiko was very proud of me and I think so was Lei. haha. 

The potato noodles had NO CALORIES. What a crazy thing. Keiko is such a fantastic host, and a great chef too! She really loved challenging us, and brought Ray some natto. I have some experience with the dish (not a huge fan) so I passed on trying it, but Ray ate some and did a really good job of holding it down. What a champ.