So, Japan...

The first few days have been pretty good．We arrived totally tired and took a bus to our hotel. The hotel is fine, and it is located in a pretty neat part of Tokyo. The sucky thing about the hotel has been its lack of internet, despite the promise of it in our room. The hotel`s partner across the street has internet, but it is super-slow and somewhat pricey (hence all the saved-up California posts below).　 On the other hand, we`ve not yet been trapped in the elevator, so I guess it all depends . . . And the area we are staying in is not exactly a backpacker `hood, so finding good, fast, cheap internet was not easy. But here we are!

And here are some pics from our first few days.

Truth in advertising, no?

This is among the more concise toilet control panels I`ve seen.

The first morning, we woke up at 3am. What to do but make for the fish market? And so we did. I`ve never seen such big fish – and so many of them. Seeing the fish auction was very cool. And since the fish are so fresh and most are flash-frozen, there`s really no smell at all (I had been a little worried about this). So, by 6am, we had toured the market, seen the bidding, and, yes, eaten sushi for breakfast (we had also eaten sushi for dinner the night before!). The sushi was AMAZING – I know `food from the sea` itsn`t everyone`s cup of tea, but if sushi is your thing, this is where you need to be. Seriously.

Tomorrow we move out of the hotel and for our house. There`s been a lot of excitement about the new train line (which just opened last weekend) to Tsukuba – today someone even told us it had wireless on it. So perhaps I`ll have to live-blog the train once (I also had great visions of live-blogging the flight to Japan, but our plane didn`t have the internets, so I was forced to watch several mediocre movies, including `The Interpreter,` `Fever Pitch,` `Sahara,` and `The First Wives Club.` Classics, all of them).