Greetings from Japan!

Hello from Prince Kawagoe Hotel! Kawagoe is about thirty minutes from Tokyo with the fast train or two hours from the airport with a bus (in the upperish left corner of the map).

I arrived in Tokyo this morning after an 11.5 hour flight from Zurich. The flight from Stuttgart to Zurich is short - less than an hour. Unfortunately, we had to sit on the tarmac for thirty minutes to wait to take-off because of traffic in Zurich. So I had to book it to make my flight to Tokyo, because the airport in Zurich is huge. I had to take an underground train from the terminal I arrived in to the terminal I departed from.

I had zero problems at customs in Tokyo, I'm happy to report (always a really happy thing to get through customs with ease!). The guy actually didn't ask me a thing. He stapled something into my passport, stuck a sticker in there and handed it back to me. Easy as that. Guess I look harmless.

I had been given instructions to take a airport transit bus from the airport to my hotel in Kawagoe. But when I went to the ticket counter, the lady told me that their buses don't go to Kawagoe. So I asked her which bus did and she pointed me to a counter further down. That lady informed me that their bus goes to Kawagoe, but only to the train station, not to the hotel directly (these buses generally make stops at each hotel). So I asked her how I could get from the train station to the hotel (it was only supposed to be 7 minutes walking or so). But she didn't know. Without other options, though, I took the bus to the Kawagoe train station. Because we took the freeway, I didn't see much of Tokyo (plus, I dozed off a lot!). My only impression is that the buildings are really, really close to one another.

When I got to the train station, I didn't see any special signs for the hotel or maps of the area. So I went to the nearest taxi, showed him the print-out from the hotel's website and asked if he knew it. He nodded, said something in Japanese and started to put my suitcases in the trunk. So I guessed that he would take me there and I got in the taxi. Well, the hotel is about 3 minutes drive from the train station. That three minutes cost 660 Yen. (The conversion rate at the airport was 156 Yen to 1 Euro. In the Internet it's $121 to 1 Yen). They have 500 Yen coins and 100,000 Yen bills!

Mom, you'll be interested to know that on the way here, I saw a 7-11! Slurpee anyone??

The hotel is a very different style. I don't have a Japanese-style room (I do have a bed and the table does have legs), but it's not typical American or European. The toilet has so many buttons, that I'm glad I could figure out how to flush it. The bathroom reminds me of a RV bathroom, only a little bigger. You have to step up into it, for reasons which are not clear to me. They have CNN on TV, but everything is translated into Japanese and you can't hear the English behind the translation. So there aren't any stations that aren't in Japanese.

Twice since I've been here, the Japanese Democratic Party has driven by, with a loudspeaker and some announcement/propoganda/??. If only I knew Japanese......

I took a nap when I got here, because I was so tired and it was raining anyways. Around 5 pm, it had cleared up, so I went to the front desk and asked for a map. At first, she tried to give me a Japanese map, because they didn't have any in English. I must have looked not too happy with that, because she asked me to wait, went running away and came back with a map in Japanese, English and German. She asked where I wanted to go and I asked where I should go. So she marked on the map where the old district is and where the shopping district is. I went walking for about two hours and took some pictures.

My camera battery ran out, so I went into a grocery store to buy a new one. If I read correctly, then an onion costs 85 Yen! 4 AA batteries cost 398 Yen. Imagine always having to have such large amounts of money available. Because the Yen is so devalued, this probably doesn't seem like a lot of money to the average Japanese, but it sure seems like a lot to me. I have to keep doing the math to convert into Euros to assure myself that I'm not giving away the farm while buying batteries.

Because I saw absolutely nothing in English at any of the restaurants, I decided to come back to the hotel for dinner. There are multiple restaurants in the hotel, including French, Chinese and Japanese. Being that I am in Japan, I chose the Japanese restaurant. I sat at the Sushi bar and told myself I would at least try everything placed in front of me. First, he brought me a menu in Japanese (I appreciate that it seems that people think you can speak Japanese, rather than assuming you can't), so I had to ask for a menu in English. He brought me one, but to be honest, it wasn't too helpful...."5 seasonal appetizers", "Salad"....not too descriptive. The cheapest menu was 3,000 Yen, the most expensive was 10,000. So by American or German standards, it's an expensive restaurant! I selected the most inexpensive Tempura menu, because I knew that meant at least part of my meal would be cooked (Tempura is lightly breaded and fried). I received a salad, a pickle dish, the Tempura (fried crab, fish, eggplant and another vegetable I couldn't identify), 5 slices of various raw fish, another bowl with shrimp, tofu, vegetables and some more fish, soup and rice. And Japanese tea, of course. I ate almost everything, including most of the raw fish, except for the soup. And all of it with chopsticks (a fork wasn't offered). I wasn't sure on the soup, are you supposed to pick up the bowl and just drink it? (No spoon on the table.) So I left it completely alone. Then came dessert. No idea what it was, but it was delicious.

Now it's a little after 8. And I noticed that Starbucks is next to my hotel. So I'm going to go get a coffee and hope that they have a Japan mug for me to add to my collection.

It's going to be a very interesting week......