June 19 – Ok Already – Let the Japan Begin: Getting Oriented in Hiratsuka

Well after getting into Hiratsuka the night before we had our first experience with Japanese food. We had yakitori, which is basically grilled meat on a skewer. Pretty tasty. I also had some nice cold Saki which they serve in an overflowing shot glass into a little wooden box. You can also drink directly from the box which gives the saki a nice woody taste.

So today we thought we’d need a little jet lag recovery time and we’d sleep in. We woke up at 5 and noticed the bright sun outside. We panicked as we thought we had slept until 5p! However, that wasn’t the case. The sun rises somewhere around 4:45a. So we went back to sleep.

Good thing we were tired, because that town is noisy. I wasn’t even quite sure of everything we were hearing. The most consistent sound was a continuous beeping coming from the crosswalk down below us. Additionally we kept seeing these vans driving by and random Japanese gibberish being blasted from its speakers. Turns out they do campaigning by yelling at everyone in town as the vans drive around. Finally, right across the street dozens of old Japanese geezers would hang outside this shop. After a while they would let them in and, well, we really have no idea what went on in there.

So taking it easy, we started the morning by taking care of breakfast. We made our first mistake of our trip by going to the “gourmet” grocery store. Prices were a little high, but nothing unlike what we’re used to in the US. We got cereal and bananas. However, later we found out about this wonderful thing called the 99 (Yen) store. Here you could get darn near anything for 99 Yen, which is about a dollar. You could get a loaf of bread, a half dozen eggs, a pint of milk, some double A batteries, soda, frozen dinners, a fish, etc. etc. Seriously, that store rocked as far as prices go.



We took a leisurely stroll to the beach just a mile or so down the road. Here we dipped our toes in the Pacific thousands of miles from the California beaches.


After that we came back and had a long nap. Still recovering…

That night we met up with Jeremy and he took us to his favorite Ramen Noodle shop. Ramen here is a little more substantial than the 3 for a dollar junk you get in the US at Walmart. You would have thick spaghetti like noodles in a delicious broth, sprouts, veggies, and if you like some slices of pork. Here we had our first lesson in chopsticks and we caught on pretty quickly. We also realized without Jeremy we would have no idea how to order food since the menu was completely in Japanese.

I probably did not introduce Jeremy properly. He is one of my friends from Purdue that I met through the dance team. He has been in Japan in this area for about 4 years now teaching English. His Japanese was pretty good and he was quite useful.

After dinner we walked around town more and we checked out an arcade. The video game setups here were pretty elaborate. There were many virtual reality type games, DDR type games where you beat on drums, and a 4 seater Super Mario Cart game where you could actually drive the games. There were also miniature video game systems that stood about 3 feet high for the little kids. Do you know those games where you use the claw to try to pick out a prize with it? Well, here they have that concept, but you get to go for much larger and interesting prizes: a large box of Ritz Crackers, huge toys, bathroom floor mats, and other weird stuff.