We only flew 4 hours from Hanoi to Tokyo but we feel like we're in a totally different world. Where are the men urinating on the street? Where are the dead rats? Why isn't anyone offering Dean drugs? Why isn't anyone trying to sell us crap we don't want or need? Why aren't people pushing us over to get on a public bus? Simple answer: We're in Japan now where cleanliness is a virtue, impeccable presentation is a moral standard and politeness is probably taught to the Japanese in utero. Everything here is over-packaged in the name of aesthetics, our cleaner THANKED US for letting him clean our hotel room and the airport bus baggage handlers lined up and bowed to us as the bus departed!! We had gotten used to Vietnamese directness, pragmatics and "snooze or lose" mentality of daily survival. We're not sure how Vietnam and Japan can even be in the same continent when we feel like we've entered a parallel universe.
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