The Saga Begins
Considering that my spring break was going on three weeks in the past, I figured it was about time to stop procrastinating and actually write about some of the things I did there. I’m going to break it up into manageable segments (probably by day) so I don’t go crazy writing it all in one sitting and you all won’t go cross-eyed from reading a gigantic block of text.
There was a little bit of drama from the other girl we were going to go to Tokyo with before Spring Break actually started. I’ll keep it short by saying that she thought that our hostel cost too much and she wanted to invite other people to split the cost. So we did, albeit reluctantly. She invited a friend of hers and Erin and I talked one of our guy friends into going with us the day before we left. As it turns out, the girl who originally complained about the price only stayed in Tokyo for a grand total of two and a half days so she could return to Osaka to attend an Economics summit as a stand in for one of her professors.
That’s right - she left Tokyo on her spring break to sit in a room and listen to economics lectures when she knows little to nothing about economics. We tried to figure this out, but it just hurt our brains too much.
After her departure we were left with our last minute roomies who, with the absence of a fifth person, declared the room too expensive and vacated the room the next day. But I’ll talk more about that later.
Erin, our guy friend, and myself took the Shinkansen to Tokyo and were very lucky to catch a seat on the Nozomi line. It’s the fastest of the three bullet trains because it makes the fewest stops and we got to Tokyo in a little over two hours. Can you say crazy efficient? I knew you could. We blindly exited the station and got our first glimpse of Tokyo. We had no idea where we were, and despite Erin’s insistence that if we started wandering we’d eventually find our hostel, I pulled the group into a koban (police box) to ask for directions; which they gave to us, using three progressively smaller and detailed maps to show us where we needed to go. We were all glad we didn’t choose to walk around blindly at that point. And despite our group’s combined inability to navigate, we managed to locate our hostel with little difficulty.
There was a minor scare during check in though when the desk manager asked for my passport. I went a little pale because as soon as I was able I took it out of my purse to lower the risk of it getting lost and stolen. I told him I didn’t have my passport and asked if my alien registration card would work instead. He said that my alien card was even better and that he was happy I was staying in Japan long enough to require a registration card. Whew.
We dropped off our bags and went out to get dinner. By accident/fate we ran into the other members of our group who had arrived the night before since they opted to skip their Friday classes. The rest of us, realizing that our midterms started right after we got back, went to class and tried to suck every last bit of knowledge we could out of class, because goodness knows we wouldn’t be studying in Tokyo.
The rest of day one was spent eating Chinese food (Erin and I got this huge smorgasbord of food that could have easily fed a couple other people with us, but we were hungry and unwilling to share) and talking about our plans for the next day. Since Sunday would be one of our member’s last day (since she needed to go be economical or something), she wanted to go to the fish market. I didn’t think it was open on Sundays because of the old saying “never eat Sushi on a Monday,” meaning that all the fish was day-old, but it was added to the ‘to do list’ along with visiting the imperial palace and Harajuku. We messed around the city for a little bit before wandering back and going to bed while anxiously anticipating our first full day of exploring in Tokyo.