Our last port. A mixture of feelings and emotions…but that’ll come later.
During PrePort, we had been told that Kobe, Japan is the sister city to Seattle. I found that extremely interesting. When we got off the ship, it was raining and very cold. That’s like Seattle. I wandered around Kobe in the afternoon with my friends and at one point I saw a Starbucks and a Tully’s Coffee on the same block. That’s like Seattle, too. Walking around downtown Kobe definitely made me feel like I was in Seattle. Seattle has a large Asian population, lots of Japanese, so of course that’s like Kobe to a smaller degree ;) In Kobe, everyone used umbrellas – unlike Seattleites who just deal with the rain since it basically is a daily occurrence from September through May! Unlike Seattle, there were people on every corner, on every street, in every restaurant and café that we passed. When you have a population of 130 million and your country is about the size of California, that’s a lot of people inhabiting the cities when most of the country is uninhabitable mountain ranges. Despite the rain, it was great to be in Japan.
Japan is by far the CLEANEST country I have visited in my entire life. There was no litter anywhere on the streets. Japanese people do not walk and eat at the same time, so it was impossible for us to find trash cans. There were none on the streets at all, we always had to duck into McDonald’s (of which there was at least one every two blocks) or some other place just to throw away our trash! Sometimes we spent 10 to 15 minutes trying to find a place to toss it, most of the time we just carried it around with us. The complete opposite of India…
One of my favorite things to do is people watch. I do it so often, wherever I am, that if I have to get something done like homework or reading I will lock myself in my room or in a library. Well, wandering around Kobe (as well as Kyoto and Osaka), there was a lot of people-watching to do. Especially the women. Think NYC is fashionable? Try Kobe, Japan! Every woman was dressed to a T. They all wore pointed, close-toed heels (usually boots), short skirts or long skirts or jeans, and fitted blazers with designer purses and perfect makeup. Wandering around in my old jeans, dirty sneakers, sweatshirt and fleece with my backpack, I definitely felt like I did not fit in!! We all stuck out pretty badly as tourists. It was quite amusing, since it seemed like the women would get completely dressed up just to go to the grocery store! All the men wore suits, but at 3pm on a Tuesday afternoon, you’d like they’d be in an office somewhere instead of the street? Apparently that’s the fashion trend, too – so much so that on the last day in port, I ran into a group of SAS guys who were all wearing their tailored suits from Vietnam out in Kobe! That was awesome.
I ate Japanese food every day while in port. At the one small sit-down restaurant we found, we took a booth and looked over the menu and then signaled to the waitress that we were ready to order. She said something in Japanese, leaving us confused until she pointed to a vending machine near the entrance that we had completely ignored. It was then that I realized that you ordered your food via vending machine! We pulled out our Yen and then chose a meal by hitting a button that looked like what we wanted. Out came a ticket, which the waitress ripped in half when we got back to the table, and 10 minutes later our food arrived. How easy is that! It was fun and so interesting.
On the second day in port, I attempted to get on the SAS Kyoto day trip since half my friends were on it. I didn’t make it on, but in retrospect I’m glad I didn’t get on it. I found a group of people who wanted to Kyoto that day too and who didn’t have Japan Rail Passes like three-quarters of the ship did (those people all went to Tokyo). We bought tickets to Kyoto, an hour away from Kobe, and took the very efficient, very fast train to the city. Again, let’s compare that with the gross sleeper trains in India… it was SO CLEAN! The transportation system with the trains, subways, and buses in each city made it so easy to get around. Kyoto was amazing, and the rain let up for that day. The infamous Cherry Blossoms were still in bloom, which was amazing to see them around the city. Just like Kobe, the women were all in top fashion and the men were all in suits. The Kyoto Station was ridiculously huge but very modern and it looked almost brand new. We bought bus passes for the day and visited a temple with a small flea market, Nijo Castle with wall paintings and lots of cherry blossoms, and the downtown and Gion districts. Gion is known as the Geisha area – we saw 1 real Geisha shopping and then two fake Geisha who were European girls being led around by their mother and a guide. They looked nervous and were obviously too tall to be real Japanese Geisha, plus you could see it in their eyes – they were deer caught in headlights with all the tourists surrounding them and thinking they were real. I talked to the guide who was helping to pose the girls and move them around, and in broken English she told me that one of the girls had paid $350 (US) and the other had paid $150 to be dressed up as Geisha, where the price difference is based on the type of material used. We spent the evening in the district, Geisha-hunting, but no luck except for the one we had seen briefly in the afternoon get out of a cab and run into a store. Slightly disappointing, but fun nonetheless.
The next day was my Overnight Homestay which I was VERY excited for. After an amazing homestay in India, I didn’t think anything could top that, but the one in Japan was awesome as well. My host family had a sign with my name on it in the Union at 11am when 50 SASers and about 40 families got placed together. We played some traditional Japanese “introduction” games like Rock/Paper/Scissors and then were sent on our way. My host was Mayumi Kekibo, her husband, and their children Yulia (2) and Hariacko (5). The children were ADORABLE and I loved playing with them. Mayumi and her friend, who was also a host for another SASer (Brett), took all of us to a beautiful botanical garden to explore and admire the landscaping and play in the cherry blossoms. For lunch, we were taken to a sushi restaurant 20 minutes outside of Kobe – it was AMAZING. All the booths were next to a winding conveyor belt where the sushi just came by on plates and you could take whatever you wanted. Of course, I had my share of Unagi (eel) which is my favorite. Between 7 of us, we polished off about 40 plates of sushi (about 2 pieces per plate) and each plate only cost 1 Yen! Definitely the cheapest sushi I have ever had! I tried some new items, but I couldn’t tell you what they are or what they were called… In the evening, the family threw a dinner party where they invited all of their neighbors and friends (about 20 extra people) to come and bring food. Japanese food is amazing, lots of noodles and fish and other stuff. I repeated the whole concept about Semester At Sea about a billion times that night, I showed some of my pictures I have in a photo album of Washington State and my family. Everyone thoroughly enjoyed the picture of me and my car… “Honda! Honda! Good car, Honda!” That was awesome. One of the neighbor’s daughters, Yuko, is 17 and (get this) going on a 6-week exchange to SPOKANE, Washington in October!! Her English was very good, she was really excited, and we exchanged e-mail addresses since I’d love to hear about her experience. Most of the women could speak English very well at the dinner party, the men were alright but they gave an amazing effort (a million times better than I could ever do at Japanese!) and I spent 5 hours just talking with them about the countries I’ve been to, about America, asking them about Japan, and just learning about their lives. I loved my Homestay and my Homestay family who were so welcoming and open and excited to have me, just as I was excited to be there.
One of my favorite things in Japan? Heated toilet seats. Basically amazing. And taking a bath instead of a shower where there is a heater inside the bathtub so the water heats up after the tub is filled! The Japanese cookies/snacks are so good, too. I now have a bag full of “Koalas” (little cookies shaped like koalas with chocolate/vanilla filling) and “Fish” (same as Koalas, only fish) and Collons and chips that taste like baked Ramen noodles. The ice cream was great, too!
On the last day, I went to Osaka for a few hours with Brittany, Ellen and William. It was raining and we got very lost. We had lunch at a sushi restaurant, attempted to go downtown but none of us had a LonelyPlanet or had any idea what to do there so we just wandered and looked at stores. In the evening we went back to Kobe and shopped, attempting to use up the last of our Japanese Yen playing video games, going bowling, and buying snacks. I enjoyed Japan, even though I didn’t go to Tokyo. But I always leave SOMETHING in each country – it gives me a reason to come back one day. :)
When we got back on the ship with only 1 injury (a girl was piggybacking on one of her friend’s backs on the way to the ship and apparently fell off and hit her head on the cement and had to get stitches – but she doesn’t remember any of it, so you get the picture…) and no one was left in port. When the ship started to pull away from the port, I stood out on the back deck and watched as Toshi, a Japanese man who had befriended many of the students and faculty and had too much disposable income and too much time on his hands, was doing donuts in his car right next to the port and kept waving and honking! I stood out on the back deck with some friends for 2 hours, talking about Semester At Sea and how it was our last port and how the voyage has changed us and how we know it is going to continue to change us years from now.
We watched until the very last lights of Japan disappeared behind the horizon.
