After a very long flight, we made it to Japan. I’ve never been on a flight that long before, and it turned out to be pretty awesome. Basically I ate, slept, watched movies, and read on my nook…pretty relaxing, even if it was in a very small space. I had joked with my brother about carrying a sign with our names on it, but he scoffed and said “I’ll be the tallest guy there”. Turns out he was right. We took the Narita express to Tokyo (ooh! pretty! and fast!), and made it to Ikebukuro, where our hotel (the b ikebukuro) was.
The room was larger than I expected (still small, though,) and very fun looking. We freshened up and went to dinner with David and his gf, Suzanne at a Korean place. (This was Whitney’s first experience with being a vegan in Japan – she ended up eating rice and kimchi because nothing else was available. Whitney ate a lot of Fiber One bars during this trip). Walked around afterward and saw a Starbucks (ooh! coffee!) and a Krispy Kreme donuts, which I unfortunately did not get a picture of. Suzanne told us that the wait to get a Krispy Kreme donut is exceptionally long…so they are very popular to take into the office or share with friends because waiting a long time for something means you really care. Whitney & I headed back to the hotel and after one very small detour (where we wandered around the ikebukuro station, wondering where to catch a train to the ikebukuro station) we ended up in a very clean pachinko & “red light” type district near our hotel – no one would make eye contact or even glance in our direction.
We tried out the beer vending machine (the beer was pretty terrible) and watched some “premium” tv (100 yen, not porn), and went to bed.
