Arrived in Japan

Kumiko says that Japan is the most wonderful country I've ever been to. Everything is perfect here and I've never tasted such good food, according to her. She obviously hasn't been around Wales much.
Kumiko: I'm sorry Hedd but just in case you didn't know, the UK is world-known to be the worst country for food. British people's taste-buds are literally like... dead

Apparently it's been scientifically proven that Japanese people have the most developed tastebuds in the world. The experiment was probably carried out by Japanese scientists, but there we go.

Anyways, konichiwa from Tokyo! After a long ferry ride, a long-ish bus ride, a short-ish metro ride and a short taxi ride I arrived at Kumiko's appartemnt late at night on Thursday. It's good to be able to understand at least the basics of the language of the country I'm in, even though when I first tried to use my Japanese in Osaka to buy the bus ticket up the only word the woman behind he counter underderstood in my sentence was 'Tokyo', and from then on we continued the conversation in English. The dialect they speak in Osaka is very different from the Tokyo dialect I've been taught, or at least that's what I blamed it on. On the bus up I noticed three interesting things about Japan: they drive on the left side of the road (as does, having just looked it up on Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_on_the_left_or_right - Malaysia and Indonesia, so that will make me feel a little more at home while over there); outside of the cities there's virtually no houses, just miles and miles of forrested hills with a huge expressway tearing its way through, which I found quite surprising given the country's high population density, and; many drivers (as in China too), whether on a pedal bike or in a lorry, wear these white gloves, presumably to protect themselves from the drity steering wheels, making it look like a large proportion of East Asians are lepers.

There'll be something on Tokyo itself when I've seen a little more of it. It's big. It's very big.