Welcome to Japan

After about a month away from my blog, I think I have finally had enough time to catch up from the past month's events. As I last said Andrew and I were on our way to Japan for a six day trip. We got back from the trip to the end of a semester and the beginning of a new one, on top of us both being sick, securing a wedding hall, a newly discovered American TV show which nightly plays 6 hour marathons and trying to edit about 1,000 pictures from Japan.

Alas, I think I am back. I will segment our trip in to a series of blogs. 

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Our journey began at 6:00 am, after three hours of sleep. We were awake late cleaning and packing.

I was fully ready and eager to leave, waiting for Andrew to finish getting ready in the bathroom. 

We headed outside to catch a taxi to the airport shuttle bus. It wasn't until we opened the door with our luggage that we realized that it was snowing, hard. We have had an incredibly mild winter, having only about two snowfalls prior to this day. It took much longer to catch a taxi, all the while waiting in sleeting snow. 

We finally got to the bus stop, and eventually on the bus. This made me feel very uneasy. As I have mentioned before, Korea doesn't really have plows that patrol the streets. So we were zooming along in a bus on the unplowed highway. I don't know what it is about Koreans, but they don't seem to slow down for conditions. After an hour ride that felt like seven, we made it to the airport. 

Once boarding the plane we pulled away from the gate to hear an announcement that said we would wait a "few moments" for deicing the plane. (Why don't they do this prior to our boarding?) We waited for over an hour for the process to finish. 

deicing the plane

Our plane finally left for it's 2 hour journey to Tokyo. We were served a Japanese style lunch:

You can see sushi rolls on the left. The center middle tin had some sort of vegetables and marinated meat. Below it is egg and seaweed. Upper right tin had a small piece of smoked salmon. Below the salmon was some sort of fishy tasting.. thing. 

A closeup of the marinated meat and egg/seaweed roll. 

Alas, we landed!

We found our way from the airport to our hostel. We had landed late, got delayed an hour before getting on the next train into Tokyo, and finally found our destination. By now we were exhausted on three hours of sleep. We found the nearest food, which happened to be a Dominos. We ordered the most delicious pizza I have ever eaten. We ordered a sampler which had two slices of four different types of pizza. The crust (even under the toppings) was stuffed with a sour cream/cheese filling. There were unusual toppings such as squid, pesto, shrimp, garlic cloves, broccoli, and things that we couldn't identify. 

We had a guided day tour planned early the next day, so we headed to bed early (in our exceptionally tiny private hostel room).