11/17/2018
(Long post ahead. Scroll to the bottom for the lesson of the day.😂)
“Open minded ka ba?” is the itinerary.
Japan had been always on the plan for some time but I was not expecting it this year. I mean it’s too expensive, and I felt that I need to study a bit of this and that Japanese culture to truly understand why I would want to be there. Plus the need for visa.
Anyhow, Japan happened kinda unexpectedly, and I won’t be choosy na. 🙂 I mean i’m just so happy to set my foot on The Land of the Rising Sun, and that’s enough of itinerary for me.
So I’ll just get what is there waiting for me.
CHILDHOOD FLASHBACK
The first thing I saw when we got off the plane in KIX airport was a huge Super Mario Brother poster. Instantly, Japan felt familiar. Super Mario was my childhood. Proof is my very bad eyesight courtesy of playing too much Nintendo games.
Japan has this “nostalgic” feels. Like, I know that they’re so modern and high-tech but the aesthetics and the looks of the people kind of the same from the magazine I read back when I was a kid. They have this “anime-ish” look with their sformal coat and tie just like the magazine that I read in the 90s.

BAGGAGE TRANSPORT, TRAIN TIX, SIM CARDS
We stayed for awhile in the airport to do some boring stuff.
There’s the luggage forwarder. It’s a service where you can have your luggage forwarded or stored. I won’t bore you with details. 
The train tickets are kind of complicated. We got ICOCA, and those day pass train tickets, and there’s too many train route maps. And I’m too lazy to understand them. My brain can only accommodate EZ Link kind of first-world public transport system.


And, local sim cards are expensive and a bit complicated to get.
SLEEP
After seeing all sorts of map in the airport, I’m so sleepy. The japanese has obsession for drawing maps. There’s train map, bus map, tourist spot map, all sorts of map. And, The cold weather did not help, and the “intentional” long flight.

Mark and I took turn sleeping after having coffee at the airport.

TOILET
Everyone raves about the toilet of Japan. It certainly deserves a whole separate post.
It definitely can do any thing including masturbate you. Just hit the “front” button, and water will spray straight to your clitoris. The Japanese could have just added a “dildo” feature, and their toilet is perfect!
So there. So far, I’m liking what Japan was throwing at me!

JAPANESE EXTREME KIND OF KINDNESS
I thought Filipinos are champions of hospitability but Japanese brings it to the next, extreme, level.
They’re so polite and kind to the point that it can get awkward. It’s hard to think how they did the “comfort women” thing when they’re really such extremely nice people.
Our first day was spent at Wakayama City. It’s quite far from Osaka. It’s a small city. It feels like I was in Biliran. It was that quiet kind of place. Maybe because it’s a weekend that the streets were empty. There was not much people moving around.







We stayed at GUESTHOUSE RICO. It was a backpackers’ place.




The dinner experience was kind of an experience. Since it was a small city, almost no one speaks English.
The first resto we went to was empty. Its menu had no English translations, and the lone staff could not speak English too. She instead kindly pointed us to a restaurant across.
The other restaurant’s staff could not speak English too. But thankfully there were other customers so I ended up just pointing to the neighboring table’s order, and asked the staff to give us the same as theirs. 
And these were what we got. Not bad for our first dinner in Wakayama!

So I guess the itinerary for today is experience Japanese’ kindness. 🙂 It’s
so hard to explain this but the Japanese people we met this day would feel so bad that they could not help us, and I would end up trying to appease them that it’s okay, it’s not your fault.