A Tough Intro to Tokyo, Japan

When we decided to change our final plans during our journey to include Japan, we had to do some rather lengthy air flight arrangements to be as economical as possible. That included today when we flew from Christchurch New Zealand to Brisbane Australia, then to Singapore and on to Tokyo. It turned out to be 31 hours. We thought nothing of it other than it might take a toll on our system.

But arriving here, we had three surprises. The first one was failing Passport Control. We were detained in a special room and interrogated for over an hour. For whatever reason, they put us on a high-risk black list. According to these Japanese officials, they do an individual background check on people coming into the country. It's a combination of where we've been over the last while, where we're staying in Tokyo and confirmation we have exit flights out.

First they grilled us on where we're staying. We thought it was pretty straightforward- it's a homestay.com accommodation but during the interrogation we felt maybe not as good an idea as we thought? They feigned understanding of what homestay.com was until we were able to compare it to a guest house. They continued questioning exactly where we were staying. Through the questioning, I had visions of the owners being government spies and bringing us into an overthrow coup. When they were satisfied with that, they then asked why were we in Istanbul, Turkey and when? They were asking specifics of the reason why we were there (which was about 2 weeks prior to President Ergan's military coup attempt). The whole session was only an hour but it felt very weird and actually worrying at times. We were then let go.

If that wasn't uncomfortable enough, we next had to confront the rail and subway systems after not sleeping for more than a day and not understanding Japanese:

Don't bother counting- there are over 20 different subway/ train lines with some being both. Through this haze we also had to change trains and English is pretty non-existent. Just trying to figure out if we had enough money on our ticket was tough because you had to exit with sufficient funds. But we got to our destination on time.

So the owners are showing us around town and I'm quickly grasping the fact that there's a lot of raw fish stores. Did you know Japanese eat fish every day, including mornings?:

The owners are coming over tomorrow morning bringing with them a traditional Japanese breakfast. As I'm allergic to seafood and don't like fish, as the saying goes- "Houston, I think I have a problem".