Japan: Ici at Last!

And now I'm in Japan... Yay! We landed and went through Immigration (we lied and said that we were planning on staying only 6 weeks instead of our actual length since we don't have full VISAs yet). That took about 30 minutes. Then we got our bags (yay! nothing was lost!) and I exchanged $400 to Yen (boo! the exchange rate went down!)... We then waited for about 30 minutes for the shuttle for our hotel (Holiday Inn) and then checked into the hotel and the room is actually pretty nice for the cost, but smells of smoke. Free Internet though, which is nice. Of course the geek in us had us setting Gretchen's router up so that we can share the Internet =D.

We were pretty tired so we kinda dozed while watching Japanese TV (specifically a Tom Hanks movie subbed in Japanese) and then at around 7pm we walked to a Family Mart to buy dinner (we didn't feel like eating at the hotel for more than the cost of the room). Of course we enter and the store owners are all like いらっしゃいませ！ which means "Welcome!" We browse around and I end up getting an orange mango drink, some yakisoba, and some dumplings for 633円. First experience with being confronted with full-fledged Japanese was paying for the food/getting them to heat it up. Very scary. I haven't quite grasped the amounts of money available via coinage and via bills so I was trying to pay the amount in coins, but didn't have enough so I paid with a 1000 yen bill so now I have a lot of coins.

The food was really good though for being store-bought and microwaved. The drinks are expensive. All in all, I'm having fun! After dinner I tried to stay up till at least 9pm JST to call my family via Skype (it'd be 8am EST) but the Internet was down and I fell asleep so we woke up at like 1am JST and the Internet was back up so I called then and posted this entry. Now it's back to sleep until tomorrow, when we'll head to 東京 (Tokyo) and うえの　(Ueno) then back to Narita to fly to ふくおか　(Fukuoka).