The Amazing Race...

We have been attending a base orientation all week. It basically informs you about life on base, living off of base and embracing Japanese culture, and how to survive public transportation in Japan. (That is a small list of what we learned this week!)

Today (Thursday) was field trip day. We attended a morning lecture about the Japanese railway system (Yokosuka railway, actually), how to purchase a ticket, different places we could explore, and how to get around the train stations. We decided to take Rowen and Arjun with us. Not the greatest idea, but we had two reasons. 1) Rowen LOVES trains. 2) They both had been stuck in hourly child care this week b/c we had to attend these classes, so we figured, why not, we'll take them with us.

After we left the lecture hall, we started walking toward the main gate of the base so we could get to the Yokosuka-chuo train station.
We decided to go to Yokohama for our field trip. We felt like we were on the Amazing Race b/c we had a difficult task at hand: navigating the yokosuka railway system which is all in Japanese, so we had no idea what we were doing. Although we were not in a "race", like the people on the show, we were, nonetheless, in DEAD last. We were supposed to follow these people to the station and try and figure out things together, but b/c of a certain someone (Rowen) who was walking at the slowest possible speed, it took us forever to get there!! He might of been walking slow b/c it was about 100 degrees outside with about 3000 % humidity!!

When we finally got to the station, we did just fine purchasing our tickets. We purchased a Pasmo card which is a reusable card for purchasing tickets and other items in the train stations. Rowen was pretty excited to be on the train.It only took us about 25 minutes to get to Yokohama. We purchased a delicious Japanese treat at the station and another cell phone charm using our Pasmo card!
We had lunch at an Indian restaurant called Spice Cafe and then just wandered around all the shops in the station. It was just too hot to do any outdoor exploration. I'm not exaggerating either...see the pink towel that is tucked into my purse in the picture above? Everyone here carries something like that around to wipe the sweat off of their faces. They have an assortment of towels to choose from, so we bought a couple. Hopefully we only have to use for a few more weeks!