Sunday, April 22, 2012

Japan, April 10-14

We arrived in Kobe, Japan on April 10. We made arrangements to travel across Japan and meet the ship in Yokohama on Friday April 13. We stayed on land as the ship traveled between Kobe and Yokohama.

Kobe was in full bloom with cherry blossoms throughout the city. Everett got a chance to visit Kyoto which apparently is the city known for cherry blossoms. It rained two days out of the five that we were there but temperatures were in the 60s. I enjoyed Japan a lot. It was very clean and organized and the people were friendlier than in China. Japanese people tend to be more robotic especially when we were in Disney. Everyone seems to follow a protocol as well. For example when I would order food, they had certain lines and were just very professional almost in each activity.

On April 11, we had to travel from Kobe to Tokyo and were considering the bullet train. We then decided to take an overnight bus which would get in to Tokyo at 7am. The bus was really nice. I was uncomfortable for a while but I slept really well. (Imagine me sleeping on a bus!). The bus provided blankets and slippers.

On April 12 we arrived in Tokyo. We walked around the city and went to a baseball game.

On April 13, we went to Tokyo Disneyland. One of the attractions is Theme park Tokyo DisneySea which we visited and had a fantastic time. One of the attractions was a Cape Cod village. I have visited Cape Cod every year since I was born. To be half way around the world and see an attraction that was very personal to me was emotional.

The language barrier was interesting. There was a lot more English than I expected but the shows and attractions were lost to us, since they were in Japanese.

We spent a long day into the evening seeing attractions and going on rides at Disneyland. The ship, now in Yokohama, was about ½ hour from Disneyland and we arrived back on the ship at 2:00 a.m. Even though we had one more day in port at Yokohama, we did not get off the ship. The weather was raining and our legs were sore and by the time we got ready, it was too late to do anything. Overall, we really enjoyed our visit in Japan.

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