Konnichiwa Japan!

Okay, I know you all have been dying to know about my trip! Heheh.

So here's an update. I'm gonna blog this entry in my China trip style, eg. Day One, Two, Three because I've got a truck load of pictures and I have Picasa-fied them pics to make my life a whole lot easier. :)

If you all hadn't already noticed in the earlier post, my parents were drivers of the day because they 'escorted' 5 of us to the airport. We left home around 3something pm and had a slight problem fitting all the luggages in the boot. (I definitely over-packed, whoops)

From left to right: ChengChoo, Sebastian, Me, SiewWai, JunKang

Reached the airport, went through all the neccessary processes like checking in our luggages and making sure we get good seats.

Hahah. StephT is posing for the camera in the background.

Waiting/killing time at the boarding area.

The smiles explains the excitement in everyone..well, except Charm Man who is erm, pretending to be asleep.

Landed in Singapore after 45minutes or so on the airplane.

Jakun-ed at the super clean toilet for awhile. By that, I actually meant emptying my bladder lah.

Because we had 3 hours of free time in the airport, everyone splitted up to do whatever they wanted. Most of us walked around the shops to keh-poh, tried the free Bak Kua samples and had dinner at BK's. We were so sick of burgers after that man.

Three hours later we boarded the plane.

Wah!! Got mirror some more! Can check whether got any food stuck in between my teeth or not. Heheh. Trust me, the mirror is very useful for vainpots like me.

We had an option to choose between the Japanese meal or the International meal. I opted for the Japanese one and it turned out like the picture above. Grilled Mackerel fish with omelette. I did not fancy it that much.

Approximately 6 hours-7hours and one Definitely, Maybe movie later, we finally landed! The weather was chilly like Genting Highlands, me likey! As soon as we landed, everyone made their way to the phone booth to call home and expressed their 'I'm Safe' lines. Well, almost everyone except me. Hahah.

The girl in the fourth picture with the tag hanging around her neck is our liaison officer who is really pretty because she has such big eyes. Her name is Nao, and she's so sweet when she talks :)unlike most Japanese who talks quite roughly. Let's just say we didn't really set a good first impression to her because we were too tired when we were greeted by her in the airport. Hahah.

Got onto the bus and headed straight to where we will call 'home' for the next 3 nights. The journey took us about an hour? (not sure cos I fell asleep) As far as I remembered, it was pretty far.

This is our 'home' called the National Olympics Memorial Youth Center or NYC for short.
That place is very huge and we were placed in Building D where we shared the same building as the other international teams.

The view from my room.

The bathroom looks like this.

We are supposed to all share the same shower room so if you're really open-minded you can get in there butt naked and have an all-girls shower party or something. Obviously, our minds were not that opened so we rather wait for our turns to shower. However, this wasn't the same case for the Chinese Taipei boys. I heard they all bathed together and one of my friend was even invited to join in their 'party' . Heheh.



Picture 1 and 2 shows the lounging area whereas Picture 3 and 4 captures my extremly small but comfortable bedroom. Everybody had a room to themselves but two of my friends got scared so they shared this extremely small room and left the other vacant for the whole 3 nights! Haha. I wanted to do the same because I thought I would get scared too but in the end I was too tired to even get scared so I just plonked myself onto the bed at night.



After settling down and leaving our luggages in our respective rooms, we headed downstairs to take a short stroll to the cafeteria for lunch.


We had to insert our money into that machine to get our lunch ticket and then choose whatever we wanted to eat ranging from beef rice to udon noodles. Lunch was about 550yen=RM17.

After eating, we went back to our rooms to just chill and unpacked some more and killed more time until it was time for us to get to the Yoyogi Gymnasium Stadium for our rehearsal. Unfortunately, I was told we were gonna walk there. Worse still, the walk would take up to half an hour. OMG.

These Japanese puts cleanliness at the top of their priority list. Upon reaching the stadium, we were instructed to change to our cheer shoes which should only be worn indoors.

After the rehearsal, we were to change back to our outdoor shoes. Lol.

Soon after that, we walked the streets of Japan (hahah, I'm a noob in remembering the name of the streets). Okay, if I'm not mistaken I think it's Harajuku Street. Anyway, we went there to look for dinner.

Someone suggested we go our own ways to find whatever we wanted to eat but then everybody was so united they decided on Ramen noodles in the end. Haha.

The restaurant was a cosy, little restaurant where the whole floor were taken up by us cheerleaders and I'm glad about that because the first picture shows us toasting and yelling 'Charmmmmm Seng'. Besides that, they also purposely slurped their noodles up loudly. Thank God there were nobody else watching apart from the waiters. Heheh. Oh by the way, my noodles cost me 750yen which is equivalent to RM 23.

Later, we walked some more to just look around at those little interesting shops which will make you go 'ooohh, aaahhh'.

I know I went 'yerrr' when we stopped by this shop. Please note that I only say 'yerrr' when I see cute stuffs/disgusting things. I'm that weird. Haha.

I see...pink handphones! Lots of 'em. Colourful handphones. And they're so cheap! Like around RM60 only. Some say it's disposable. I don't know about that. All I know is that we cannot buy it back :(

We then decided we could walk no more because it's just insane if we were to walk all the way back. So, we took the smarter option to take a train back! Why didn't we think about that earlier, right? Hmph. The train ticket cost us 230yen which is about RM7 and it only takes about two stops to get back to NYC. In comparison, we can take the KTM to KL Sentral for only RM1.60 here. Everything over there is so overpriced.

That's Nao teaching SiewWai the noob. Hahah. Nolah, all of us were noobs because it was all written in Japanese.

So, that wraps up Day One in Japan. FYI, Japan is one hour ahead of us. I remember going to bed at 10pm Japan time that night which makes it 9pm Malaysian time! Omg. The last time I went to bed at 9pm was way back when I was in Standard 1.