Day 1: Tokyo

Hello and welcome to the first blog entry of our trip! You excited? We began last night flying out from Sydney to Tokyo at 10pm, arriving at like 6am. It was the worst flight! We flew Qantas which was pretty good but I can never sleep on planes. I was too uncomfortable to be able to get any sleep. I got a little drunk and had some phanergan but all that did was make me too drowsy to do anything, so I just spent nine or so hours with my eyes closed half listening to podcasts. Shara and Lyndal both foolishly became ill before leaving on the trip so I don't think their trip was much happier.

As soon as we got to Tokyo airport all of the escallators started talking at us which is always exciting. We took a train to the place in Tokyo we were staying which was maybe a bad idea because it seemed to take like 2 hours and cost 3,000 yen each ($45). We were too tired to figure out a better way though. We got to our hotel at about 9am, and were told that we couldn't check in until 2pm. They took our bags and we sort of walked around for a bit. We found many great things in the department store next to our hotel but most of them were two million dollars. At some dude at our hotel's recommendation we went up to the top four levels of the department store, each of which was filled with about 10 restaurants. It was a kind of weird thing, where all of the restaurants were pretending to be outside and had all of these faux-outdoor fittings like brick walls and lanterns, even though we were inside on the 12th floor of a massive building. Japan is weird. We walked around looking at all of the restaurants' plastic food (restaurants in Japan often advertise their food by putting plastic versions of their dishes in the front window), and then picked the weirdest restaurant and went in for lunch to kill some time. Shara and Lyndal got some real weird things (reviews pending), but I was not hungry.

After this we walked all around Ikebukuro, and went into all of the convenience stores we saw while we waited until we could check in. Finally at 2 we were able to get into our room. We stayed there and watched Japanese game shows for a bit. In between rounds they play Organ Donor by DJ Shadow which is p. weird. Lyndal took some shampoo in her bag and it exploded. She kept it in a plastic bag though and on the bright side now all of her stuff smells like shampoo.

Now everyone else is sleeping (Shara is snoring and it sounds like "shhhhhhh... pshhhhhh") and I am megatired too so I am also going to take a nap. Sorry this wasn't a very exciting entry but we will hopefully do more interesting stuff when we don't feel like wanting to die!