Tokyo, Japan, Days 0-1

A college friend and I visited Tokyo May 11-18. She'd been touring Asia for over a month, I live in Seoul, and both of us wanted to see Japan, so it made sense to meet there for a short vacation. While I liked Tokyo a lot, I think it would have been more enjoyable if I was "into" that culture as much as I am "into" Korean culture. Pretty much all the anime-themed things we saw were wasted on me. We also went there without really knowing much about the city (what there was to do), and neither of us knew Japanese at all, besides a few basic phrases. I meant to learn the alphabets before I left, but there just wasn't time. And no one there really spoke English to us at all, so it was a lot of gesturing. This may have been less frustrating if I hadn't just gone through the same thing several months ago when I came to Seoul (though, even then, I knew enough Korean that I rarely had to *just* point at things). Comparatively, I think Seoul is much more foreigner-friendly. All public transportation is in Korean and English (and some places, Japanese and Chinese, too), and it seemed much more straight forward (I'm still not sure what the difference between all the lines are in Tokyo). The subways are also more modern. Some of the ones in Japan didn't even have sign boards, so you had to listen for the stop name in Japanese (or read the sign posted on the wall outside when you arrived at a stop). We didn't even bother trying the buses, and given the cost of the subway, we were afraid to take a taxi (though they were really hard to find anyway... in Seoul, they're near every bus stop and subway station). Anyway, we visited a lot of Tokyo's districts, and did a lot of walking. I want to write more, but I'll probably end up just posting pictures and captions for most things....

Day 0 My friend and I arrived in separate terminals at Narita. Thankfully, she was waiting for me outside the baggage claim and customs area. Our first stop was SoftBank, a cellphone carrier, to rent a wifi hotspot ("egg") for the week. It was $12 (or so) for the base rate, then $15/day for unlimited usage. Unfortunately, battery life on the egg was pretty terrible, so after it died mid-day the first day, we ended up turning it on only when needed. Anyway, the trip from Narita to our hotel in Hanzomon via the Narita SkyAccess subway (with a transfer to the Hanzomon metro line) took about 90 minutes and cost $15.


A kid with some crayons designed the subway system.
And rather than LCD displays, they have paper ads that flap in the wind...


We stayed at Hotel Monterey Hanzomon. It's located right by a subway station.
The room was small, but actually bigger than I was expecting.


Japanese money. It's about 100 yen to a dollar. As Korean won is about 1000 won to a dollar,
I was constantly confused. (The Japanese bill in the right picture is worth 10x more than the Korean bill.)



We decided to just eat dinner near the hotel. As everything was entirely Japanese,
I'm not 100% sure what I ordered, but it tasted okay. Then we bought some Japanese snacks
(though, the top snack is a Korean brand) at the nearby FamilyMart.

Day 1 For our first full day in Tokyo, we wandered around Akihabara. We only planned to see the bi-annual Kanda Festival near the Kando-Myojin Shrine, but ended up finding Electric City, too. (Where they sell a bunch of electronics, and have tons of arcades.) Then we went to the Tokyo Dome (City). The popular 86-member (according to wiki, not sure if they're all active all the time) Japanese girl group AKB48 was having a concert there and we could hear them warming up. We thought about going to the mini amusement park, but decided to leave after just shopping around for a bit.



Kando Festival. There were half a dozen+ different groups of people wearing the same outfit,
parading around carrying palanquins and chanting. It drew quite the crowd.


The Kando-Myojin shrine. (And you may have noticed I like taking pictures of "old vs. new.")


Electric City. Lots of electronics for sale, and games to play.


I'd never eaten raw eggs until this trip. It wasn't very pleasant. Even after mixing it in,
it was still gooey... And my new favorite thing: erasable pens (on the left)!



Tokyo Dome (home to the Tokyo Giants baseball team) and its adjacent amusement park.

Days 2-7 to follow soon!

Goodbye, level 2!

I can't believe it's been over a month since my last post. Oops. :) I've been pretty busy, I guess...


My one roommate's doodle of us ("Anne, Yoonji, Bre"), drawn during a late-night
convenience store noodle run, posted on the wall of said store.

My one roommate's birthday is only a few days before mine, so we had a joint party on April 27. We went to a nice Italian restaurant in Gangnam called Vapiano's. Then we went to a bowling alley. I don't actually know of many in the city, so I guess it makes sense it's a little expensive. It was only ~$5 per game to bowl, but you were required to order a drink, and the cheapest was $9, making it $14+ per person per game. Ouch. :( After that, we caught a taxi to Octagon, a popular Gangnam club. Up until this point, I'd only been to a few in Hongdae. Gangnam clubs are an entirely different beast, it seems. Hongdae clubs are filled with mainly college kids. The average age at the Gangnam club was at least 5 years older, possibly due to the more expensive cover. Before 11, it's only $10. 11pm-12am it's $20. After that, it's $30. And the cheapest drink is $10. So we got wristbands before 11, then went to a cheaper Japanese place down the road to drink, and came back and danced. Ah, to be a poor student again, ha. But really, it was more fun to sit around a table talking and sipping our sake than chugging an expensive watered-down drink near the bar (no drinks on the dance floor) and screaming or not talking at all. Anyway, Korean celebrities frequent most of the Gangnam clubs, and I actually saw a couple. Now I just have to go back with Hera, who can use her aegyo (hard to define, but basically, acting cute to get your way) to get us into the VIP section. :)


The Smashing Bowl lanes and a special event at Octagon.

In class, we had a small party with blueberry yogurt cake for myself and a classmate whose birthday is a few days after mine.


Eating cake with chopsticks... :)

I also went to a shabu-shabu restaurant with my roomies and another friend on my birthday. I loooove 고구마 ("go-gu-ma," sweet potatoes), so they bought me a sweet potato cake!


Shabu-shabu and birthday cake!

SNU apparently has a good performing arts program. The opera students give a free opera performance a few times a year. The spring semester's performance was Don Giovanni. The students sang in Italian, but they had Korean subtitles off to the side. Thankfully, reading is one of my better skills, and I knew the story, so I understood pretty well. Still, it was a little strange to hear a foreign language that wasn't Korean, heh.


Free Don Giovanni performance.

Our final exams were May 7 (Speaking) and 8 (Writing, Reading, Listening). After our final final, a few of us went to the Banpo Bridge light show. Unfortunately, different websites gave different times for the final weekday show, and we showed up at about 9:10pm, thinking there was one at 9:20. It turns out it (probably) started at 9, because it's supposed to last 15 minutes, and we only saw maybe 5 minutes. :( Still, it was very pretty. Though, it would've been a lot nicer if the lights hadn't been set to My Heart Will Go On.....^^




My camera's shaky, but you get the idea...

May 9 we had a class field trip to 청계천 ("Cheong-gye-cheon", Cheonggyecheon), a stream in Jongno, north of the river. We split off into groups of 3 and had to take pictures with various people (a woman wearing sunglasses, etc), and at various points along the stream. It was fun, but very tiring. It started raining just before we reached our destination (bridge #14 of 23), but at that point, the refreshing rain was more welcome than the heat, heh.



A waterfall at the start of the stream, me in front of some Chinese displays,
a picture of a poem I had to memorize back in the US. (I still remember it.)

We didn't receive our grades on a slip of paper this time, but they were posted online pretty quickly.



I earned the same three certificates as level 1.


Certificate of: completion, perfect attendance (100% attendance), excellence (>90% grade).

This semester, however, I earned another award as well.


Scholar(ship) certificate.

It says (roughly): The above person, while completing the Korean course, with a sincere/honest attitude and by earning an excellent grade, served as an example for others. Whereupon, this scholarship certificate (worth the sum of 300,000 won [~$270]) is presented.

Apparently, I got the highest grade in all of level 2 (maybe 70 students total?), but the program's website says you must also be recommended by your teachers. If so, that's a bigger achievement, I think. (Having someone recommend me, rather than just earning the highest grade.) Unfortunately, the scholarship is just a tuition voucher, and I didn't receive it until after I'd paid for levels 3 and 4, so I guess I'll be using it on level 5. :) (And, if you receive perfect attendance or honors certificates for the first 5 levels, supposedly the 6th level is free.)

School break is currently almost halfway over. Last week, I went to Tokyo with a college friend. Though I posted a few pictures to Facebook every day, I'll also be writing a blog post here shortly. :)