japan again

i'm officially on summer vacation!! and i'm in japan again, before going to the US for the rest of the summer. it's really great, i love to be here! it's interesting because i feel that there is no culture shock for me to be here. i definitely notice things that are different, and things that i like, but it's not like culture shock. for example, i love the gutters, narrow roads, trains and train stations, the way stairs look, the way houses look, the cars. this time, even driving on the left side of the road seems normal and sitting on what would normally be the driver's side of the car in other countries but here is the passenger side doesn't phase me. oh, except when i went to the grocery store and my eyes were bugging out because of all the amazing things they had in there. beautifully packaged wonderful looking meat, for one. beef, chicken, ground meat, fish. all of it lying neatly in little packages and carefully covered with plastic wrap and labeled precisely with a price. and everything so nicely and clearly arranged in rows. no piles of unnamed meat that you pick up with a plastic bag, or giant bags of different types of frozen meat. ahhhh meat. i will eat you in america, especially beef.

anyway, it feels normal to be here, but also weird, because japan is not my home anymore. yet i can take trains all the way across the country and all over tokyo, no problem (haha!!). of course, it helps that they have way more english in train stations now than they ever used to before. but i'm pretty proud of myself that i got myself to 4 different places in tokyo by myself, and then all the way to toyama from the tokyo area, which is about 5 hours away, and i had to take 3 different types of trains to cities where i had never been before.
i saw this pretty sweet train in tokyo. it had cartoon pictures like this painted all along the entire train!
i also rode a double decker shinkansen!! (bullet train) it was pretty awesome. i've never seen one like it before.
the front was huge, way bigger than a regular shinkansen.
i also rode on train lines of 3 different japanese companies, and i have a better understanding of which trains are which company now. it irritates me that there are so many different train companies and you have to buy tickets from different places for the different train lines. but whatever... where my friend in tokyo lives is close to a keisei line, my old school is on a seibu line, and toyama as well as other places in tokyo are JR (japan railway). but a cool thing is that now all over the tokyo area you can use something called a suica card. you can put money on it and it works going through the ticket machine for any train line. i don't know that you can use it beyond the tokyo area or not though--i didn't see any way to use it around toyama area stations. however, i was surprised to realize that it could also be used on busses in the tokyo area. AND it can even be used in vending machines on train station platforms!
the oval shaped grey thing in the bottom middle is where you hold the card for it to be read. haha!

anyway, there are other things i could write about that perhaps i will later. i visited the school i went to in 7th - 9th grade. i also visited the neighborhood and house where i lived during that time, as well as the church i went to during that time. and i could probably tell some stories about hanging out in toyama too. we shall see. and in 5 days or so i will be in america for the next ~6.5 weeks. weird.