To Tokyo

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Our alarm goes off at 5am. The immigration staff at Melbourne Airport are in their usual form, and are ordering everyone around as if they’re primary school children. They are particularly severe on the elderly and anyone whose understanding of English is a bit limited.

We arrive at Narita Airport and buy a SIM card for our phone. The girl behind the counter gives it to us very respectfully with two hands and a slight bow. I take it from her with one hand and then quickly remember reading somewhere that when someone gives you something in Japan it must be received with two hands, and that to do otherwise is considered highly disrespectful. I break into a cold sweat, and begin to wonder whether coming to Japan might have been a huge mistake. We’ve spent the past few weeks reading about this and a whole lot of other things that Japanese people find highly offensive, and I’m sure that we will have managed to do most of them by the time we leave here. We’re not supposed to walk while we’re eating, or talk on the phone on public transport, or blow our noses in public, or put soya sauce on our rice, or point at anyone with a chopstick, or stab food with a chopstick, and these are only the offences that we know about; I'm sure there are plenty of others that we haven't discovered yet. I try to retrieve my error by thanking the SIM card lady in Japanese. I’ve only been able to learn two Japanese phrases so far; one of them means "thank you" and the other one means "good afternoon", but I can never remember which one is which. I hope that I haven't used the wrong one.

We catch the train from the airport to Shibuya station. Google Maps tells us that our hotel is a four minute walk from the station. There are lots of exits from the station, and we pick the wrong one. It is dark and raining, and we watch as a large rat wanders across the footpath in front of us. We then wander around aimlessly in the rain for an hour and a half before stumbling across the hotel. We are soaked. The receptionist greets us with towels so that we don‘t drip all over the paperwork while we’re signing in.

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[Lulu]

Fun
Have fun ❤️???❤️