Japan

                         
Here I am, finally. I have sat down to write this blog, like 100 times. Let's face it - I have spent the past 6 weeks in survival mode. There's been so much to do- it seems like a blur. Like Japan was only a dream.

When we went to Italy last summer, it was an 11 hour plane ride. Long, but not terrible. When I planned our trip to Japan, we had a 15 hour flight from NYC to Shanghi. I thought that 15 hours is not much longer than 11 hours..... WRONG. That is WAY too long to be on an airplane.

We flew China Eastern Air and boarded the plane just after midnight. It was perfect timing, we could fall asleep and when we woke up, half the trip would be done. The plane takes off, we get in the air, and then we had HORRIBLE turbulence for 5 hours. That's right, for 5 hours straight, the plane rocked and rolled and shook. It wasn't ideal. My husband was hating his life, gripping the arm rests and having full-on panic attacks. I'm pretty sure he thought we were going to die.

I leaned over to him and whispered, "I'm going to need you to be calm, because if the kids know you are freaking out- they are going to freak out." I was fine. Truly, I was already on the plane. If it was going to fall out of the sky, there was nothing I could do about it. So, I ate my airplane Chinese food and watched a movie. The turbulence didn't bother the children at all. They slept and were happy.

Thankfully, the last 10 hours were smooth so my husband didn't have to jump out of his skin. When we landed in China, I thought he was going to kiss the ground. We had a few hours to kill until our flight to Japan so we got breakfast. The breakfast menu was interesting. Beef and noodles, dumplings, rice. We ate, my 13 year old bitched because the internet was running slow, and we napped at the terminal.

Our flight to Japan was delayed for a few hours and by the time we got to Tokyo, we were exhausted and smelled bad. We purchased a train ticket and the lady at the counter spoke good English. She wrote down which lines to take and we were on our way. We get on the train and our stop was the last stop. It was an hour and a half. That was fine, it was late, the train was empty. Well, we are 2 stops from where we need to be and the damn train finishes it's route and then starts running in the opposite direction.

My oldest started crying, "We're lost in Japan!" The crying pissed off my husband, who was seething. The youngest was snapping. Our pocket wifi wouldn't hook up. I just laughed. "This reminds me of the time the bus dropped us off in the middle of nowhere in Rome." No one else was amused.

At the next stop, we got off. "We are taking a cab!" my husband declared, "I don't care how much it is." Long story short, this guy that worked at the station walked us to another train line and just pointed at this map in Japanese and we figured out what we needed to do. We were at our train station in 15 minutes and we took a cab to our apartment.

The kids were grumpy as shit, they both had colds, I thought my husband was going to throw them out of the window. Everyone was hungry. "I'm going to walk down to the convenience store," I announced. It was 11 pm and here I was in the middle of Tokyo - going on an adventure.

I got some Bento boxes, some bananas wrapped in plastic (that was weird), some chilled coffee for the next morning, cough drops. The man at the counter tried to talk to me in Japanese and I just smiled. We ate and then crashed.

We were all up by 6 am. We felt like we'd been hit by a bus. It's a 13 hour time difference. We planned to go to Shinjuku National Garden and then meet up with a kind-of friend of my daughter's for lunch. We put on our tennis shoes and hit the road. We got our pocket wifi hooked up so we could use GPS and actually navigate the subway system like normal humans. As we were walking to the train station, there was this gate thing at the top of the hill. We decided to explore. We walked in and it was a cemetery and shrine. So cool.
                       
We wandered through the graves and then made our way to Shinjuku. We walked through the city to the garden and it's everything was larger than life. It was like New York City, except everything was in Japanese and it was much, much cleaner.

As we walked through the gardens, cherry blossom petals rained over us. It was beautiful.


The weather was perfect and we wandered around in a daze, almost. In disbelief that we were here, on the other side of the world. As we were leaving, my oldest complained that her stomach hurt. We were meeting her old marching band friend, so I told her that maybe she was hungry and that we'd have lunch.

We did meet up with him. He was a marching band kid, newly 19 and stationed at an air force base close to the city. Air Force boy was genuinely glad to see us. He doesn't see many non-Japanese people who aren't soldiers. We took us to a restaurant where we cooked our own okonomiyaki.

Then my oldest got terribly sick. We went back to the apartment right away. She vomited profusely. I packed the medicine cabinet with me, so I gave her meds and told her to take a shower. Air Force boy showed me where this amazing grocery store was near the house. It was 2 levels, which was weird.

Here is the thing about Japanese grocery stores- if you don't read Japanese, you are taking a bet on everything you buy. Like, I brought orange juice. It was in a carton, it looked like there was an orange on the carton - but that shit was not orange juice. You think to yourself, "Is this squid or barbeque spare ribs? Is it chocolate or bean paste?" hahaha. It was an adventure for sure. I just took my chances.

The next day, my oldest was still sick. Poor child was on her death bed, crying. "Mom, my stomach hurts so much and I miss Hollister boy."
                
A stomach bug AND dopamine withdrawls? It was just too much for her to endure! I didn't have time for that though, because I had to attend the Festival of the Steel Phallus with my 11 year old. That's right- we went to a penis festival. Because I'm the mom of the year.

It really wasn't that scandalous- at least by my standards- I guess that's not saying very much. They had these 3 giant penises in these shrines and there was a temple where they were playing traditional Japanese music. They were selling penis whistles, penis tee shirts, penis lollipops. People of all ages were there, elderly couples, young children and everything in-between. There was a guy dressed up as a penis in a kimono walking around. The mood was jovial. We found it fascinating. We ate penis-shaped fried rice sticks wrapped in teriyaki marinated bacon for lunch and watched the parade. I enjoyed it.
                                 
We made our way back to the train station and I was feeling a little woozy, the jetlag was kicking in hard and I was nauseated. The subway car was full and all of a sudden I felt really hot, my ears started ringing and I started to feel faint. I'm going to pass out, I thought.

I didn't, but when we stepped off the train my youngest looked and me and said, "Mom, why are your lips blue?" I explained to her that I didn't feel well and that we'd be back soon. Bless this child, she was so worried about me. The whole walk back to the apartment she kept saying, "Don't forget to breathe, mom."

When we did get back, I switched off with my husband who took the little one to Akihabra to check out all the anime stuff. I crashed and slept for 15 hours. When I woke up in the morning, I felt well - and so did everyone else. We went exploring as a family again.

We went to the Ueno Zoo and then went paddling in the swan boats in the park while we viewed the cherry blossoms. It was absolutely breathtaking.
           
We went to the Tokyo Nation Museum and viewed all the art and statues. So freaking cool. We tried to keep a slow place and be low-key as we were all still recovering from our post-travel funk.

The next day, we hit it pretty hard. We went to Meji Shrine in the morning, did some window shopping at Harajuku, we crossed the busiest crosswalk in the world in Shibuya, we had lunch at the Metropolitan Building where we got a birds eye view of the city, we went to the Maramatsu Flute store and where my oldest got the chance to try a variety of really expensive flutes....we ended the day at Kawaii Monster Cafe where we ate crazy food and got to see a show. It was on my youngest daughter's bucket list. It was a great day!





We spent the following day at Tokyo Disney Sea - and Disney is Disney - it was fabulous. The park was really cool. King Triton and Jasmine's castle was there. The show at the end of the night was AMAZING. Fireworks, pyrotechnics, magic- pure Disney. It was so weird to see Mickey Mouse and all the characters come out and speak Japanese. The kids got a kick out of it.


Disney kicked our ass and we were soooo tired the next day. We had more of a chill day. We met up with Air Force boy again who took us to the mall. The girls got outfits and we sampled almost ALL the candy in the candy store. We had lunch at a cool little restaurant.

Going out to eat in Japan is funny because most places that are not touristy, don't have English menus. You are lucky if you get a menu with pictures. So you look at the picture, point to it, and hope for the best. They would bring food out and you'd think, "I don't know whats in this, but f*ck it, I'm eating it." hahaha.

That night, everyone crashed early and I ran to the grocery store and explored our neighborhood. We were not in a touristy area AT ALL and it was so cool to explore the shops and back alleyways. I had a quiet dinner alone underneath a Japanese lantern and read a book. It was amazing.

The next day we went to Senso-ji which really cool. Then we went to Akihabra where the kids played in the 7 story Sega arcade. It made my husband so happy. It was the coolest. We pet cats in a cat cafe. I loved that, since I'm a crazy cat lady. We window shopped and had tempura for lunch. We headed to Meguro river at sundown to see the cherry blossoms and lantern but a freak wind storm cut our time short.
                     


We visited the Imperial Palace on our last day in Japan. The gardens were so pretty. Then we went to this park near our apartment where there was a waterfall. It was like this hidden oasis in the middle of the city neighborhood. That night was cold but we ventured out for- Chinese food and to view Tokyo Tower all lit up. Beautiful.



The next day was departure day. My family was excited to go home, but I was so sad to leave. I enjoyed not bearing so many domestic burdens, not having to plan dinners or carpool. Japan was like a beautiful, amazing dream that I wasn't ready to wake up from.

The trip back was not as rough as the trip there. We were glad to be home but a piece of Japan will leave in us, forever I think. Our traveling has definitely brought us closer as a family. It's taught us a lot about ourselves. We are adventurous and brave. We navigated one of the biggest cities in the world! We ate strange foods and communicated with people that don't speak our language (pointing, nodding and smiling got us through 9 days in Japan). We decided to do something and we did it. It was a great experience for the kids and for us and it makes me so happy.

I have developed a bad case of wanderlust. We would like to cruise the Greek Isles and Croatia out of Venice in the summer of 2020. That's a save-for-two-years kind of trip. I'm trying to convince my husband to do a short off-shoot trip to Mexico City in 2019 but we'll see. He's not too keen on it.

The trip is done, the school year is coming to an end, I am starting to feel like a normal human again. Hopefully, I will keep up this blog. Who knows what kind of adventures 7th grade and high school will bring?!?!