Sam in Japan: 6/2 Language Barriers, Exploring Kashiwa, and A Tour of Abiko

So the past two days have been pretty interesting. Yesterday, my group and I decided to explore Kashiwa. We spent quite a bit of time at this awesome bookstore, and then later we saw a tech store and realized we should try and get us a wifi hotspot.

So no one at this store could speak English, and our Japanese is very minimal so we had a bit of a problem. This really nice lady tried really hard to help us out in explaining how much things cost and how much data we can get, despite the language barrier. We finally decided on getting a hotspot and 6GB of data. It was a little pricier than some of the rentals in the airport, but we figured we should get one as soon as possible and if we had problems we could always walk back.

Well, we had problems.

The wifi would not work at all, and we spent maybe and 1 1/2 - 2 hours messing around with it to try and get it working. Finally we decided to go back to get some help. We spent another 1 1/2 hours with an attendant who was trying hard to get it working. Finally he realized that we never activated the sim card, and apparently we are supposed to do that. We also have to have a Japanese phone number, which we started low-key panicking about. Our teacher let us use her husband's, which was super nice of her. ありがとうあだち先生！

So yeah I felt super dumb after all of this, but at least now we have wifi.

That was our first really stressful situation. Other than that, it's been super fun exploring around town. Here are some pictures I took of Kashiwa from yesterday and this afternoon -

No, this is not Tokyo. Our teacher said that Kashiwa/Abiko is pretty small. I can't even imagine what Tokyo is like.

We also went to Mister Donut for a late breakfast yesterday. This is officially my favorite place to eat. The donut I had was so light and fluffy and I didn't feel gross after eating one, unlike American donuts.

America, get on Japan's level.

We also came across this really nice kimono/yukata shop. The kimonos that they had on display were gorgeous. I quickly snapped a picture of one.

Today we rode the train to Abiko and met the mayor. He basically just told us all about the cool things to see and do in Abiko, and we got a picture with him afterwards.

We then were given a small tour of Abiko. There were some really nice traditional houses that were here and there on the path that we took. We walked to the Sugimura Sokinkan Memorial House and Museum. The museum used to be the house of Sojinkan, a journalist and essayist. His house was also built in as a traditional Japanese house, however he had his own mini library of foreign books dedicated to journalism along with an impressive study room. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get many pictures of his house because pictures were not allowed for most of it. These are the ones I got from the walk to the museum to the museum itself -