Oh man, we're in China!

Hmm, it's been a crazy few days since our last post. We're in a little Chinese internet cafe in Shaghai right now, without the proper equipment to post pictures, so here's a little text-only update.

Some of the memorable events since then have been going to a "Humongous Pot of Soup" (aprox. 10 m high and 3 m wide. A crane lifted the lid off, and the spoons they stirred it with were basically boat oars.) festival in the tiny town of Yamagata. I guess it's an annual thing, community festivals seem to be a big thing in more rural areas of Japan. Being the only non-locals there, we were honored guests and even got free bowls of the stuff, although what was in it was anybody's guess. Tom ate it, I opted for a candy apple.

After a few days as guests in the tiny house of Kat's sister Tina, and going to huge rec centers, where you can basically rent out a living room, and have free drinks and massage chairs, we were off again.

We took the overnight bus from Tokyo to Kyoto, which was where Tom celebrated his birthday. Woo, bus birthday! It was a double-decker, and we were on the top which was pretty cool, and thanks to a little rum, the ride wasn't too bad. It's a lot harder to sleep on a bus than you would expect though, so we arrived in Kyoto at about 6 am and exhausted. Since it was too early to check in to our hostel, we went to an internet cafe, it had little rooms with soft mat floors, so we slept there for a few hours until we were feeling better.

Our hostel in Kyoto (K's house) was really nice. Kyoto is beautiful, full of gardens and temples, so many little peaceful escapes that make you forget you're even in the city. We had a nice Japanese birthday dinner, and some drinks in the bar below the hostel. The next day, we rented bikes, and biked around to the imperial Gardens. I got a little too enthusiastic and jumped over the little moat to look at a monkey statue, and set off the palace alarm, so we ran away and tried to look innocent as a police car showed up. How was I to know that those huge things everywher were motion sensor alarms? haha. Then we kept biking, went to more gardens where Buddhist monks were running around everywhere, got pizza, got lost, went for drinks, and went to sleep.

Then we were off to Osaka, our final Japanese destination. We felt like Tokyo was the future people in the 6os saw (clean, high-tech, slick), while Osaka is the future people today see (much grittier, darker, and more crowded). That might just have been our neighborhood though, we didn't have long there. Our hostel could only be desrcibed as super sketchy, but at least it was cheap.

Then came the infamous boat "Su Zhou Hao". It was a pretty neat little ferry. We both had a bit of a cold, so it was nice to take it easy.The restaurant wasn't the greatest, but they had vending machines that sold noodle cups and beer, which was all we really needed. :) We befriended the few other english speakers on the boat, which included: us, 2 swedish girls, an israeli couple, an aussie girl, and a japanese dude. (The japanese guy had grown out his beard for 3 months, so he would look poor. Apparently the Chinese don't like Japanese people, but he was hoping he'd at least get some pity, haha). Anyways, the boat was quite relaxing. We even all hung out in the boat's hot tub. Quite nice.

So that leads us to now. We arrived in Shaghai around noon today. I've never seen anything like it, apparently there are huge buidings but you can barely see anything because there's so much smog, and the river looks insanely polluted. This city is just bigger than anything I could imagine. We got our cab driver to drop us off in from of our hostel we'd booked, but there was just a sign that said "Closed". Apparently it shut down? It looked like a dump anyway though, so we consulted our trusty guide book, and found a nautical themed hostel called "the captain" and got ourselves a couple of sailor bunks. It's now pouring rain, and we're hiding in this internet cafe. We're excited to see what the city has to offer tomorrow. Once we're more organized, we'll post some pictures.

Hugs to everyone from China!
Kat & Tom