We took the free hotel shuttle to the international airport, and Denisa spent all of our remaining Japanese yen on snacks to tide us over until we got on our stand-by flight towards the United States. We were lucky this time, and made it on the first available flight to Dallas, and got to sit together! The 11-hour flight seemed to go by quickly. It's amazing how 3 movies and 3 meals and a few naps can make 11 hours slip by. We passed the international date line again, and this time we gained back the day we lost a month earlier on our flight. We left Tokyo at 11:30 on Tuesday morning, and arrived in Dallas earlier than that--at 8:30 a.m. on the same Tuesday morning. I guess that means that we got back to the United States before we even left Japan!
For now, we are back in Oklahoma, recovering from jet lag and getting to spend good quality time with friends and family. But it seems that we need to have a blog that covers those things that we learned from spending a month in Asia. We could title this list "Things we wish we would have known about Asia before it was too late." Some have been mentioned in earlier blogs, but we put together this list as we traveled.
*There are almost no trash cans in public places in Japan. There are a few recycling bins, but it was hard to find a place to dispose of things like a candy wrapper or a cup. We guess that people had learned to carry their trash with them, because we also saw no litter left lying around.
*Beds are definitely harder in Japan! We learned to use the duvet or bed spread as an extra layer of cushioning, but we were wishing for some kind of air bed that we could fit into our back pack-sized luggage.
*Every restaurant has only tiny water glasses. Asians must not drink much water with their meals, as they all seem to be content with a 4-6 ounce cup of water with their meals. Waitresses seemed to be astounded when we kept asking for refills because it obviously wasn't something their usual Asian customers needed.
*We saw no paper towels in restrooms in Asia. This cuts down on the litter, and also does away with the need for a bathroom trash can for tourists that are looking for one. Denisa noticed that most women carried a little terry cloth towel in their purses to dry their hands, so she bought one and did the same. Mark noticed that most men just dried their hand on their pants, so he did the same.
*More English is spoken in Japan than Korea. But we still found that less than half the people we asked in Japan did not speak English. The actual percentage is actually much lower, because we usually only asked young professionals that we thought were more likely to have taken the required English classes in school. We found very few English-speakers in South Korea, and we think it would be much more difficult to travel there on our own.
*Service was fast, efficient and great in restaurants. From the time of ordering to receiving food is usually less than ten minutes, so eating good wholesome meals can still be categorized as fast food.
*There is no tipping in Japan. That makes a 20 percent savings on the usual food budget. There is also no tax added to food. So when we ordered a 1000 yen meal, we left the restaurant paying exactly 1000 yen. The food was really affordable, and we usually shared a meal. Part of that was because they were sizable enough to both get full; the other part is that we just didn't have enough time to eat that much food with those chopsticks!
*We were surprised that we didn't see very many Americans on this trip. When we saw an occasional white person, we could determine from their accent that they probably weren't from the USA. There were far more Europeans traveling in Asia than Americans.
*We are big fans of the train system in Japan! Anyone visiting here for a week or more should certainly buy a Japan Rail Pass and learn to use it. It has to be purchased before leaving your home country and is only available for tourists, but it was a great value for us.
*Coins are used more in Japan than in the USA. If you use the equivalent of a $10 bill to make the equivalent of a $1 purchase, you will get all of your change in coins. Keeping track of all those coins was interesting.
*Bicycling is popular all over Japan. It was common place to see all ages and all walks of life riding bicycles--men in business suits, older women in dresses, young people, Mothers with babies etc, etc. Many of the city sidewalks are wide, and the pedestrians must watch out to keep from being ran over by bicyclists. The sidewalks are usually divided with an upraised stripe, but we saw no evidence that the bicyclists stayed on their side.
*It is common to see people with a mask over their nose and mouth. We weren't sure if they were sick people trying not to spread their germs, or well people trying to keep the germs out. But it is totally acceptable to wear a mask every day--not just on Halloween.
*The biggest differences between the United States and Japan seem to show up in the restrooms. About half the time we found the western style toilet that we were used to. Obviously not everyone is familiar with them, because we would sometimes find instructions posted on exactly how to use them.
More common in remote areas are the hole-in-the-floor style of Eastern toilets.
Many times there would be signage helping to clarify the correct usage of this option as well.
*Most of the toilets in our lodging were bidet toilets. They have a multitude of buttons that determine the direction and force that the water is squirted. We didn't take any pictures, and we'll let your imagination fill in the rest of the story.
*One of the button options in some of the restrooms was for the sound of flushing. It seems that Japanese women are embarrassed by some (ahem) natural sounds. So if the button is pushed, the flushing noise is piped in with enough volume to mask other bathroom sounds. Denisa reported seeing this many times, but Mark never found it in a men's restroom.
*Fresh produce and meats seem very expensive, but we thought meals in restaurants were reasonable. We're not sure what that means, but we probably weren't eating prime cuts of meat like in the picture below. Also, all of our meat was so finely sliced that there was very little by weight in each serving.
*Comic books are alive and well in Japan. It was interesting to sit beside a grown man on a train, and watch him reading an encyclopedia-sized comic book. Comics are obviously not just for children here, and they read them back to front.
*Japanese never wear outdoor shoes inside the house. Slippers were provided in each of our places of lodging, and we even had to take our shoes off at some restaurants and most temples. We were glad we had new socks for this trip!
*The only candy bar we saw were kitkats, and we saw them in every flavor except the milk chocolate we are accustomed to. This display would include kitkats in the following yummy flavors: red bean paste, wasabi, green tea, bitter chocolate, and strawberry cheesecake. We also saw orange and strawberry.
*We saw packaged snacks ready for gift-giving, and it wasn't unusual to see a businessman loading up 5-10 boxes before he got on the train. The favorite filling seems to be red bean paste--and we were disappointed when we mistook it for chocolate more than once.
*One of the packaged items that seemed to be quite popular were these french fry snacks. I thought the ten box limit was silly until we saw a woman checking out with that many.
*The Japanese seem to over-package their food. We bought a package of cookies at the grocery store in the size container that would probably hold 2-3 dozen cookies in the United States. But in Japan there were only 8 individually packaged cookies, placed inside a plastic tray inside a box.
We found that life is different in Japan, but we enjoyed and tried to embrace the differences. That's why we love the adventure of traveling internationally!
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