Joel’s Blog

July 24/25.

So traveling to Tokyo was interesting. We connected from Charleston to Atlanta. From there it was a 13.5 hour flight to Tokyo Narita Airport. You actually fly up over Wisconsin, Canada, Alaska, and the edge of Siberia to get to Tokyo from Atlanta. The flight was pretty good overall. I could not sleep much though.

We got to the Tokyo Narita Airport around 5PM Saturday Tokyo time. That was 4AM EDT Saturday. We had an interesting taxi ride to the Hotel New Otani. The drive spoke very little English. He pretty much said “USA #1!, New York, and Tokyo.” He seemed to take a scenic route which was OK except that i was dying to take a shower and get cleaned up. The hotel staff is amazingly nice and helpful. We had a drink at the rooftop bar on the Main Tower and then had sushi at a restaurant in the Garden Tower. We thoroughly entertained a Japanese couple that must have thought it was our first time having sushi. We had tuna belly (toro, fatty tuna) which was incredible, swordfish (a first for me), squid, eel, scallop, freshly dispatched shrimp (it had been wriggling only moments before), sea urchin (not a bad flavor but a nightmare texture), the cooked shrimp head innards (not good, tasted like burnt hair), a tuna roll, a cucumber roll, and miso soup. They finish up with green tea. Overall dinner was really nice even if it was expensive. ¥6,000 ( about $63!) Tokyo is expensive. We retired for the evening after the sushi. I turned on the super nice Sharp Aquos LCD HDTV and there were weird game show looking things on.

End of Day 0. Pics forthcoming… (as soon as I get a proper cable or card reader…)