We had lunch at our favorite place, and went to get our bus tickets for the bus to the airport. They call it a limousine, but it is really not nice at all. The bus ride takes about 90 minutes. The airport is that far away, but it drives around the city for a while first, and we got on at the departure point, so we get the whole ride. Strange stuff doesn’t even wait for us to arrive in Japan, it’s waiting for us at the airport. There were all these people with HUGE guns (which may be normal, I don’t know). What definitely weren’t normal were all the people in giant costumes wandering the halls of the airport. They kept us entertained as we waited, though, as did the pumpkin candy, which wasn’t nearly as gross as it sounds.A few hours later…
We’re there!! Konichiwa! We have no problems getting through customs, mostly because Bree Teacher flirted heavily with the customs fella (he was in booth lucky number 8). We had brought all our bags with us, so we didn’t need to wait for the luggage, we just went right away to get tickets for the train to Tokyo! We got our tickets and got right on the train (everything was going well—weird), and we sat down across from this old man… Whose newspaper had naked people in it. We didn’t notice at first, because it looked like a normal newspaper, but it definitely had pictures of people doing it.
The train arrived at our stop (the last stop, which is how we knew) about 75 minutes later, and we searched for our exit.
After one false attempt trying to go through the gates with the wrong ticket, we finally found the way we were supposed to be heading – hot travel tip: in Japan, North apparently is not in the opposite direction of South, this is why we had so much trouble finding the exit. We started following a map to our hotel, stopping in a few convenience stores along the way, to find some things that Bree Teach forgot/couldn’t bring (although they totally let me through security with toothpaste AND deodorant – suckers). 
In these stores, all of their magazines have naked people on them too, only they’re all out in the open, since most of them are cartoons. I’m sensing a theme here in Japan… We get to our Ryokan (inn) after a not-too-difficult search. The old lady who worked in it was so nice and she spoke English really well. She took us up to our room in the world’s smallest elevator, and showed us how to work everything. We slept on the floor, and it was actually fairly comfortable, even though the bedding was slightly confusing:After we unpacked in our room, we headed out to find something to eat. We found a place that serve beef bowls (which, we would later discover is what EVERY restaurant serves). It’s basically a bowl of rice and, yeah, beef.
It’s pretty delicious. The only problem was, we didn’t know how to work the restaurant. The door was challenging itself, but when we got in we just went and sat down and tried to order food, because we didn’t know that we were supposed to order and pay at this machine, until we saw EVERY other person who came in doing just that. The waiter guy played along, though, and brought us our food. After our meal, we looked around the area a bit (we weren’t in the heart of the city, so there wasn’t a lot to see), and back to our hotel. Tokyo is much cleaner than Seoul, we decided, but one of the biggest differences was the traffic. Cars stop at red lights! They stay on the road! We didn’t almost die at every crosswalk! … I like it.
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