Well, day one is in the books. So what have I noticed so far? Friends, I've noticed two main trends:
1) The Japanese apparently love to form orderly, long, long lines everywhere, and
2) They have crazy great automation. Lots of things are machine-controlled, from restaurant ordering, to tickets, to hundreds of vending machines everywhere.
My confusion is why these two facets of Japanese life don't preclude one another. If everything can be automated, why do you need to stand in lines? Maybe it's for fun.
Case in point: we arrived at Narita airport and flew through security. Hurrah! We were going to be early! Only, no. We still had to pick up our Japan Rail passes, which are like Eurail passes for unlimited bullet train travel. Now this is already a clunky process. We had to pay for vouchers for these back in the U.S. at a travel agency in Novi. So you get these paper vouchers. But those aren't the passes. You have to exchange the vouchers for actual passes at the JR office at the airport, with all of the passports for all of the travelers. THAT was where the intense queuing began.
You get into a Disneyland-length line that weaves around metal barriers, and signs tell you how many minutes you have left to wait. Only there is no Disney-type entertainment, only those signs which silently mock you.
90 minutes later, we had our passes. And by the way, we were the lucky ones! Another of our travel companions arrived later, waited an hour, arrived to the front, only to be turned away as it was by then closing time. Sigh.
So lots of lines. By my count, we queued (I love this word; it reminds me of spelling bees) approximately 8 times in our first few hours in Japan, to the point that my kids asked if we were going to spend our entire vacation in line! Clearly, patience is a virtue here. I suppose it's good for me.
On the flip side, though, so many things seem to be machine-operated here, which I find completely cool and utterly fascinating. If you will read back about 40 blog posts to my first trip to India, you will see that I have an unhealthy obsession with foreign junk food. So the prevalence of vending machines everywhere selling all manner of delights makes me one happy traveler.
Of course, the machines take a bit of getting used to, and when all of the instructions are in Japanese, it makes for a bit of a comedy of errors.
By the time we checked in to our hotel last night, we had less than an hour of time before a private bus we'd hired would come pick us up for a tour of the city. We were all starving, and I'd seen a food court in the mall attached to our hotel, so we headed there.
The food court consisted of several restaurants laid out in a circular fashion, with seats in the middle. Great! Perfect. Only we noticed that each restaurant had a ticket machine next to it where you had to choose your food and drinks, pay, and then receive tickets you would take to the chef. You'd then get a beeper which would alert you to your food being ready. (All this, by the way, was not immediately apparent. It took us the better part of our remaining hour to figure this out... I'm just saving you, dear reader, all of the misery.)
Here's what it looked like:
This was actually totally stressful and sweat-inducing when you have 7 kids to try to order for, you have no idea what you're ordering or what buttons to push, and you have a line of very polite but probably quite irritated Japanese behind you.
The screen had a bit of English, but mostly looked like this:
So, ok, I can see that there are omelettes and dumplings, but what are those buttons along the bottom? Where do you pay? Plus it has credit card symbols, but no place to insert a card??? Whaaat?? Anyway, we finally figured it out, and after 45 minutes of hard labor, wound up with 6 orders of pork dumplings, 2 bowls of rice and some dixie cups of water. Success!!!
No one went hungry, and now that I've figured this out, I'm a true believer, and can't wait to do it again!!
Sayonara for now.
1) The Japanese apparently love to form orderly, long, long lines everywhere, and
2) They have crazy great automation. Lots of things are machine-controlled, from restaurant ordering, to tickets, to hundreds of vending machines everywhere.
My confusion is why these two facets of Japanese life don't preclude one another. If everything can be automated, why do you need to stand in lines? Maybe it's for fun.
Case in point: we arrived at Narita airport and flew through security. Hurrah! We were going to be early! Only, no. We still had to pick up our Japan Rail passes, which are like Eurail passes for unlimited bullet train travel. Now this is already a clunky process. We had to pay for vouchers for these back in the U.S. at a travel agency in Novi. So you get these paper vouchers. But those aren't the passes. You have to exchange the vouchers for actual passes at the JR office at the airport, with all of the passports for all of the travelers. THAT was where the intense queuing began.
You get into a Disneyland-length line that weaves around metal barriers, and signs tell you how many minutes you have left to wait. Only there is no Disney-type entertainment, only those signs which silently mock you.
90 minutes later, we had our passes. And by the way, we were the lucky ones! Another of our travel companions arrived later, waited an hour, arrived to the front, only to be turned away as it was by then closing time. Sigh.
So lots of lines. By my count, we queued (I love this word; it reminds me of spelling bees) approximately 8 times in our first few hours in Japan, to the point that my kids asked if we were going to spend our entire vacation in line! Clearly, patience is a virtue here. I suppose it's good for me.
On the flip side, though, so many things seem to be machine-operated here, which I find completely cool and utterly fascinating. If you will read back about 40 blog posts to my first trip to India, you will see that I have an unhealthy obsession with foreign junk food. So the prevalence of vending machines everywhere selling all manner of delights makes me one happy traveler.
Of course, the machines take a bit of getting used to, and when all of the instructions are in Japanese, it makes for a bit of a comedy of errors.
By the time we checked in to our hotel last night, we had less than an hour of time before a private bus we'd hired would come pick us up for a tour of the city. We were all starving, and I'd seen a food court in the mall attached to our hotel, so we headed there.
The food court consisted of several restaurants laid out in a circular fashion, with seats in the middle. Great! Perfect. Only we noticed that each restaurant had a ticket machine next to it where you had to choose your food and drinks, pay, and then receive tickets you would take to the chef. You'd then get a beeper which would alert you to your food being ready. (All this, by the way, was not immediately apparent. It took us the better part of our remaining hour to figure this out... I'm just saving you, dear reader, all of the misery.)
Here's what it looked like:
The screen had a bit of English, but mostly looked like this:
Sayonara for now.
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