Japan, at last!

After a long flight and more Continental airlines soy burgers than I ever want to face again, I’ve arrived in Japan. HIF had a counter waiting for us at Tokyo’s Narita airport, and from there we headed to the hotel where we would spend the night before an early morning flight to Hakodate. With the evening free to explore the city, some fellow HIF-ers and I ventured out into Tokyo, stopping first at a tiny ramen shop to eat huge bowls of delicious ramen (infinitely better than the Maruchan I often eat at 2 AM). From there we navigated the subway system to Shibuya, home of enormous electric signs and eventually wandered through Harajuku and Shinjuku, stopping along the way for crepes and karaoke.

One of the first things that struck me as we walked through the streets was the sheer amount of English I saw--English on the street signs, the storefronts, the clothing of passersby, English everywhere, though not all of it logical nor spelled correctly. I saw t-shirts emblazoned with the words “Flap” and “Spoon” and a clothing shop named "girl love gallery," but my favorite language oddity was in Japanese:a drink named yasai seikatsu, or roughly “vegetable lifestyle.”