To the land of the free

• Woke up at 6:15am, packed final things and got downstairs at 7:15.
• The lobby staff told me to wait out front for the bus, which came right at 7:30
• Went by the Shinagawa Gods Hotel, but there was nobody to pick up. Then we were on our way to Narita
• Made it around 8:30
• Finally saw AA kiosks in English for the first time since I left DFW, so I was able to skip the check-in line.
• The bag drop line was half as long, but somehow moved more slowly (some people had a lot of bags or weird things like skis). I probably didn't actually save much time.
• No line for security or immigration!
• Made it to my gate at 9:15
• A couple minutes after sitting down, a man with the Japanese Tourism Agency came and asked me some questions about my trip. The questions weren't too personal so I had no problem answering for him (how was your stay, would you like to come back, did you do a lot of shopping...etc).
• Wrote bullets up until here while waiting.
• Boarding started a little before 10:40 (11:30 departure). We left the runway around 11:40.
• ALL THE ANNOUNCEMENTS WERE IN ENGLISH. I'm home.
• The couple next to me seem to only speak Japanese, and only oneof the flight attendants is bilingual (the rest just kept repeating the same thing in English slower and louder). I know how that feels, and tried offering to use Google Translate and charades to help translate a couple times, but the flight attendant waved me off.
• This ride had some major turbulence in it. Usually when turbulence gets bad I tell myself to look at my drink to prove to myself that we're steady. This ride failed the litmus test and my cup toppled over during one of the shakes, which wasn't a little unnerving.
• My plan had been to sleep during Dallas' night time, but I was hardly able to get a wink between the violent shakes and seatbelt warnings. The longest we went without one of those episodes was maybe an hour.
• Instead of sleeping, I spent most of the flight sitting with my eyes closed, but also managed to watch Arrival, La La Land, and Moana.
• We were served 3 times (the timing seemed more in-line with Tokyo-time, but I wasn't going to say no to food). Dinner was beef + rice with a roll and some salmon and corn/tofu/mayo salad thing, the 'snack' at 2am Dallas time was a turkey sandwich with a kitkat and 3 grapes, and breakfast around 6am Dallas time was an omlette with a grape tomato, 3 potato wedges, and a fruit salad with a grape, a slice of grapefruit, a slice of pineapple, and a slice of honeydew.
• I was surprised that other than the breakfast there weren't any vegetarian options. One of the things I heard the flight attendant keep repeating to a Japanese man was " you can just eat the grapes and the Kit Kat." Some meal!
• Touched down right at 7:50am Dallas time.
• Passport control for all passengers (foreign and nationals) was automated, which was kinda cool. Customs took awhile though, because for some reason they only had 2 officers working and all the nationals and foreigners were in a single line (I had been jealous about how nationals in other countries could so easily walk through their reserved queues).
• Walked out and met Mom, Dad, Amanda, and Granny Lou
• Went to The Original Pancake House for (second) breakfast and got ham & eggs and buttermilk pancakes. <3
• Business as usual...need to pack up for moving to Seattle! Somehow I'm able to resist sleeping until around 9pm

Traversing Tokyo

• Walked to takanawadai metro stop (the JR Yamanote line had been taking was not included in my 24-hour pass I had bought at the airport when I arrived.
• Rode to Ginza stop
• Popped up to see the famous high-end shopping area & architecture, but didn't stay long.
• Rode to Tsukiji stop
• Walked the wrong way while trying to find the market, but my GPS eventually updated to show me that so I was able to correct it.
• Saw the Tsukiji Hongan Temple as I walked to the market and thought the building looked cool. I saw some people going in/out so I decided to try.
• This was a buddhist temple that had tons of incense smoke floating around when you walked in. There was a monk at the front facing the Buddha and chanting, but most of the audience seemed to be tourists.
• There was a guy standing at the back who asked where I wS from as I entered, then handed me an English brochure and welcomed me in.
• Left and saw fish market. I walked around and tried a few more samples, but I pretty much already knew what I wanted to buy.
• Left and rode to Abilhabara
• Was a little confused when I exited, because the metro exit was to the east of the JR station and electric city was on the west, but I found a tunnel that let me pass through to the other side.
• Walked along a couple streets, passing several SEGA arcades, electronic stores, and a maid café
• The maid cafe sounded like it would be funny to visit with a friend, but awkward and uncomfortable alone. Basically you pay 2000 yen for some young girls dressed as maids to dote on you for an hour (play games with you, spoon feed you, sing to you, etc.)
• Walked through sof___ (an electronics store)*******. It had 7 floors of any kind of electronic you can think of! I didn't think the prices were all that different from the US, but it was kinda cool to see everything in one place.
• Walked back through the tunnel get on the subway to Ueno
• Walked down Ameyayokocho street, which Levin had suggested for street food when we drove by.
• The rain started up again while I was walking through, and eventually I just picked some place based on the prices so I could get out of the rain and under their awning.
• The waitress didn't speak any English, but I ordered bubble tea and hot pot and we used charades to make sure the food wouldn't be too spicy.
• When it came out, it was too hot to touch, but I started trying to slurp some of the soup down (in Japan it is considered rude to eat silently, which as some of you know, kills me).
• I think the waitress thought I was hesitating because I didn't know how to eat it, so she came over and helped me hold chopsticks.
• When I finished I had 167 yen remaining, so I bought a 150 duck wing to try it (and stay out of the rain, which had gotten harder).
• Tried to walk through Ueno park, but the rain was still coming down, Some of you already know my relationship with rain...it was pretty unpleasant so I gave up after about 20 minutes
• Rode subway to Asakusa, which is near the sensoji shrine.
• I had come to go to the Asahi Brewery, which Levin had pointed out and said we could go there for free tastings. He said the short building was for tastings and the tall one was for business. When I got to the short building, I walked in and found a host who didn't speak much English in a fancy restaurant. I said I was looking for Asahi and they pointed to the building next door. So I went there and found the lobby of an office building with no indication of there being s tasting room somewhere upstairs.
• There was a small exhibit abut Asahi's environmental measures that I strolled through briefly.
• Left and went to Tawaramachi, which was just one stop over, but I had an unlimited pass so I figured "why not?"
• Coming out of the subway, I made the mistake of using the posted sign to help me figure out where to go. Apparently they do this thing here where they rotate maps so that what's 'forward' is up. I had assumed when I read the map that north was up, so I ended up walking all the way back to Asakusa *facepalm*
• Walked back and went to Kappabashi Street to window-shop. This area is known for selling restaurant supplies (everything but the food), including specialization in fake food used for displays. I found a few things I liked, but nothing I couldn't find in America (some nice bowls, cutting boards, etc.)
• Had trouble finding tawaramachi station on the way back. Aapparently it's only accessible on one side of the street, which I thought was kinda dumb.
• Rode about 45 mins to Harajuku, napping on the way.
• As I waked into the Meji Shrine grounds, a recording said they were closing soon and wanted all visitors to leave. But I swam upstream because Google has said they shouldn't close until 6, so I thought it must be an early warning (it was 5:08)
• Made it all the way to the main shrine, where something was going on (a bunch of monks chanting).
• Soon, a guard came up and asked all the people watch in to leave because the park was closing.
• Guard made me go out a different exit from where I had entered (apparently it closed at 5:20/5:30 instead of 6), so I got a little lost finding my way back to the station, but GPS bailed me out yet again.
• Stopped on Takeshita to get a sweet crepe, which seemed to be really popular when I had walked along the street a couple days before. It was basically a big crepe with a slice of cheesecake and whipped cream and nuts inside (I got the salted caramel one). Yum!
• Rode to Shibuya
• Found the Haichikō statue, which I had read about before. Basically Professor Ueno had this Akita dog that would always meet him at the station to walk him home, but one day the professor died and didn't come back. Even still, Haichikō continued to return every day and wait in the same spot for his master, so after he died the city built this monument to honor his loyalty
• Went to Tokyu Hands, a DIY store that I thought might have some small horn decor thing. There were 24 floors but not all the floors led to consecutive ones. The map was a little confusing at first, but after awhile it made a little more sense. Basically each of the 8 floors had an A, B, and C, but As and Cs could only be reached by Bs.
• Went to the Don Quixote at Shibuya, which had similar options, but the snack selections at this one seemed better. Their sex area was much smaller (and actually separated off with in 18+ symbol), so maybe this one just had different priorities.
• Went back to the Starbucks at Shibuya Crossing and got a sakura (cherry blossom) frappachino. This place had the best people watching of the whole trip! I managed to get a reasonable spot pretty quickly because someone happened to be leaving (the best ones take hours to open up). I spent an hour here
• Took metro back to hotel (ended up at Shinagawa station instead of takanawadai somehow. Apparently some of the trains take one fork and others take the other, and mine happened to be bound for Haneda Airport but I'm not sure how I would have known. Like the other time  when I tried to leave the subway hate it closed and gave me an X, but I was able to push through and hero walking.
• Packed and posted pictures and worked on bullets. I was 3 days behind because there was always something I wanted to go do! In the other places I always got to a saturation point where I was willing to (often reluctantly) sit in my hotel and write bullets instead of ping out and doing things, but this was not so in Tokyo.
• Went to sleep at 3:30am (trying to reset my circadian rhythm)

Mt. Fuji

• Woke up at 7:15, started walking by 7:45. I needed to get to the World Trade Center bus terminal by 9:00 and it was about an hour walk away (I could have done the train, but I figured I'd be sitting on the bus most of the day. Gotta get those steps in somehow!)
• Didn't get too lost - made it at 8:45.
• Check-in was easy. The staff member spoke English and said we would be departing from 'gate' 3 on bus 1 in seat 3A. I had come into this basement room via an escalator, but all around it had numbered glass doors with curbs just outside for the buses to park. There were 3 50-person buses going to Mt. Fuji, all leaving at 9:00.
• My bus had about 25-30 people on it, so my guess is they had over 150 tourists and just distributed them evenly.
• My guide's name was Take (pronounced like "sake" with a t. He said if we forgot his name we could just yell sake and he would respond :) )
• My seat buddy was a British girl who looked to be about my age named Amelia. She's been traveling for 8 months after quitting her job (I didn't pry because it didn't seem appropriate). She said she would be leaving Tokyo tomorrow for Sri Lanka, but wished she had changed her flight to allow more time in Tokyo. After Sri Lanka it's back to Britain because she's run out of money, but she's really lamenting that (I got the sense that she really needed to get away from it all, but I'm not sure what the details are).
• Take spoke to us about several buildings and legends as we left the Tokyo area. It was about a 1 hour drive to our first rest stop and he managed to fill about 45 mins of it.
• Got to a rest stop with a meh souvenir shop and an observatory with an ok view, but Amelia and I were really looking forward to seeing the view from the water.
• Drove to mountain station #4 (we were supposed to go to 5, but snow fell on the road between 4 & 5 so we couldn't pass). Terrible gift shop, but there was an incredible view of the Japanese alps.
• There was also a strip of broken trees that were taken out by an avalanche a few years ago. Instead of rebuilding the part of the station that was destroyed, they have preserved the Avalanche area "as a reminder of the power the mountain commands over us."
• On the way to the station, there was a 'musical road' which had been grooved so the tires made a song as you drive over it. Unfortunately, we couldn't hear much in the bus (especially with the rattley windows), but the YouTube videos of smaller cars doin it sound much better.
• Drove back to hotel at an amusement park we had passed, where we had lunch.
• We were served in the basement, where tables had been set up to accommodate each group of people. It was here that Amelia and I learned we were the only lone travelers, so we sat together with Take.
• We weren't quite sure what everything was, and a couple of the things had pretty unappealing textures (one felt like you were eating a moist cloth), so we left that.
• The souvenir shop was slightly better here, so we got postcards in case the next one was just as underwhelming.
• Clouds were coming in and shrouding the mountain, and Take said they might be in the way when we got to the water part...
• He said he had a group one time that came and said "we've done this tour 5 times and never seen the mountain!" So we were lucky that we had even seen it that morning.
• Drove 1.5 hours to a pier on lake Ashi (with one pit stop on the way where we saw a valley that should have had Mt. Fuji as a backdrop, but it was gone.
• Took a ferry along Lake Ashi to Hakone. We never got to see Mt. Fuji here. Amelia kept saying "I'm so gutted!" I'd never heard that before
• Passed a Shinto shrine whose hate was half-submerged. The legend we heard has a couple versions (one we got from Take, one we got from the recording that played during our ferry ride). It says there was some 9-headed dragon related to the Loch Ness monster (actually, Ashi's name supposedly comes from "Nessy," a nick name for the monster) that was terrorizing the town of Hakone. In one version the terrorizing acts were that he kept eating the children, in the other version he was destroying crops and the people had to offer their children as sacrifices. Some monk was traveling through from Kyoto and took pity, so he decided to defeat the beast. He somehow made a whirlpool to suck the beast in and latched a sunken tree trunk to his ankle. Version 1 says he was left at the bottom and is still there, version 2 says that as soon as he was trapped he magically transformed into a good dragon that still protects the people of Hakone.
• Took a gondola up to the top of Mt. Komagatake
• The gondola station was a very ugly building, but back behind it was a Shinto shrine right on the peak that we were able to go see. It was cold, so we just went to look at that and came right back to take the gondola down. The view got more and more obstructed by the minute
• Take told us that Hakone is the only place to buy these things called 'magic boxes' that are puzzles to open and close. He said they're almost impossible to find in Tokyo, and I'm not sure if it's true or not but the shop owner/maker seemed very humble and so I bought a 10-step box.
• Drive back to Tokyo without stopping. Most of us slept (Amelia said she was trying to figure check in for her flight and check her hostel details for Columbo)
• There were 2 drop off options: Shinjuku or Ginza. Since Shinjuku was on the Yamanote line to get me back, I picked this one. We got there around 6:30, and Amelia stayed on to Ginza so this was goodbye.
• Since the time was close to 7, I went to the Godzilla again to see it from the street.
• It started raining, which wasn't much fun, but at least it was less than the rain in Shanghai (but still more than a drizzle).
• The Godzilla show was different this time, and not that impressive from the street. The audio was easy to hear, but it looked like a lot of people were just confused about what was happening because you couldn't really see the Godzilla unless you were looking for it (they had turned off its lights and only had the red eyeballs on)
• The rain got a little harder, so I went back through Don Quixote and bought a few snacks.
• Found the Tokyo Metropolitan Building, which I had read about having a free observation deck. I went up the North Tower (the only option) to the 45th floor and looked around. Tokyo doesn't really have a centralized skyline...it's lots of scattered buildings. So the views were nice because they were high up, but there wasn't really much to look at. The 3-tier building where a bunch of "Lost in Translation" was filmed was nearby.
• Passed the LOVE Monument on my way, so I got a picture since I hadn't had time to the day before.
• Tried to pass another capsule hotel on my way back to Shinjuku, but it was also a boring building.
• Got back to hotel and picked up another 500 yen voucher.
• Dropped my stuff off in my room then used my 2 vouchers at the food court. I ordered what looked kinda like a bento box but turned out to be bibimbap.
• Went up to room and planned my last day. Basically going to do a counter-clockwise loop around the city