Japan - Trip 3, Day -1-0
First, Day -1:
It's thursday, the day before I get on the airplane, and I had tasked myself with picking up the JR Passes. This is why I was in NYC on thursday, and where iPhone1 was destroyed. I slept over at a friend's place, and she woke up rather early.. the only reason this is all being mentioned is because it plays in to the scheduling slightly.
Alright, travel plans called for leaving JFK around 11:30 EST on Friday, getting in around 15:40 JST on Saturday. We left early, to make sure that traffic didn't screw us, which it didn't, but I didn't end up sleeping Thursday night. At around 5 I left to drive around and bring everyone to the apartment building that I live in, where the rental van one of us had rented was. There were 6 of us in the group, 5 of us on this plane and someone we were to meet up with in Japan - more on that later.
Anyway, around 6:30 we're off and we get to the airport, get through screening, and get on the plane with no major problems. There was very little turbulence except for a period of about 2 minutes, 30 minutes before landing, at the middle altitudes, but I didn't get much sleep, unfortunately. You'd think after being up for 30 hours around 5-6ish from Thursday morning until noon-ish Friday, I'd be able to sleep for more than 15-45 minute stretches, every 2-3 hours, but you'd be wrong. We actually took off slightly quicker than expected, and made good time. We were supposed to land at 3:40, we got to the gate around 3:15. But it didn't help us..
See, like I said earlier, we were waiting for one person here in Japan. His scheduled arrival time was 6:15, actually landed at 6:24, and finally got through customs and everything around 7:19. So we were stuck in the airport waiting for him, because we had his JR Pass that would let him get on the train 'for free'. While waiting, we were interrogated by the police, I think because we were a bunch of foreigners with a lot of luggage looking like we were just lazing about in one spot for a few hours. The police officer somehow had singled me out from the beginning, somehow.. or maybe I indicated I did by speaking first when he addressed the group? I dunno, but I ended up being the one talking to him, which wasn't so bad. Basically just asking us simple things like who here spoke Japanese, are all these bags ours, what country are we from, are we here for business/pleasure.. I don't think he was suspicious of anything, just curious. At the very end, he said 'なんとなく', which I had to look up.. but other than that, I held the conversation rather well I think. Jim followed along and understood what was going on, the rest looked confused because they don't know Japanese. :P
We got on the narita express, got off at tokyo, exited the station, walked over to the marunouchi train line, and got turned away - oops, kanda's on yamanote. Back in to the JR station we went (the station guard probably thought we were all idiots), got on the correct train, walked a few blocks, and we were at the hotel! People's spirits are mildly low, but not terrible, but a lot of us are cranky by now. Which is completely different from being Crunky, which I intend to go purchase soon. Ignoring that last sentence, we checked in - they had combined our complex arrangements to avoid room shuffling, which was good because I was going to ask if they could and they already had, so only one room needs to be shuffled tomorrow, instead of 3 (there were limited openings for the rooms with two beds, so tonight only got placed on one reservation, then another for 4 days, then skip a day for a kansai trip, then two reservations for the rest of the days - one for group A, leaving net week, one for group Awesome, which includes me, leaving the week afterward.)
But we all managed to get in our rooms, figure out how to turn on the electronics, etc., then went for food - cocoichi curry! I didn't realize the one near here was so small, otherwise I'd probably not have suggested it.. i thought there was additional seating, but it turns out there were 10 bar-style seats, 6 in one group, four in another, so they had to turn away a few people while we clogged the place up. I felt somewhat bad about that. Everyone seemed to enjoy their food though, so back to the hotel for everyone, then Jim and I started wandering around. We didn't find much, but apparently if you want a massage, kanda station is a pretty good place to get one. I had (#UNDEF) more offerings (percentage-wise) in one hour last night than I have had in all of my days up until today. Going from 0 to 4 in one hour was weird.
Which brings me to my final point - what the hell happened to my gaijin shields? It's like the forward deflectors are at about 5% capacity, does the colored hair not scare you? My obvious whiteness? My tallness? The person next to me (tattooed, pierced, tall, etc.) I got more random approaches (the police officer, the massage girls, etc.) than I would have expected. Perhaps last night's phase of the moon (whatever it was) is to blame, but it was weird. I was just marveling to myself for a while about how strange it was to actually have people try and talk to me (even if it is for offerings of massage), instead of just assume I don't know Japanese and thus skip over me entirely. Also, every time I've asked so far about people understanding English, they've often responded with 'a little bit', as opposed to the 'no' you usually get. After the 'no', speak english anyway, just slower between words - they'll very likely know the vocabulary, so you can still get by. ;)
But yeah, it's 6:33 in the morning and now I'm wide awake, whereas after our little walking adventure (which was supposed to have been longer, we had only come back to get directions somewhere), I just passed out on the bed. But only for 4.5 hours. boo.
Tomorrow's our first real day, let's see what happens..
It's thursday, the day before I get on the airplane, and I had tasked myself with picking up the JR Passes. This is why I was in NYC on thursday, and where iPhone1 was destroyed. I slept over at a friend's place, and she woke up rather early.. the only reason this is all being mentioned is because it plays in to the scheduling slightly.
Alright, travel plans called for leaving JFK around 11:30 EST on Friday, getting in around 15:40 JST on Saturday. We left early, to make sure that traffic didn't screw us, which it didn't, but I didn't end up sleeping Thursday night. At around 5 I left to drive around and bring everyone to the apartment building that I live in, where the rental van one of us had rented was. There were 6 of us in the group, 5 of us on this plane and someone we were to meet up with in Japan - more on that later.
Anyway, around 6:30 we're off and we get to the airport, get through screening, and get on the plane with no major problems. There was very little turbulence except for a period of about 2 minutes, 30 minutes before landing, at the middle altitudes, but I didn't get much sleep, unfortunately. You'd think after being up for 30 hours around 5-6ish from Thursday morning until noon-ish Friday, I'd be able to sleep for more than 15-45 minute stretches, every 2-3 hours, but you'd be wrong. We actually took off slightly quicker than expected, and made good time. We were supposed to land at 3:40, we got to the gate around 3:15. But it didn't help us..
See, like I said earlier, we were waiting for one person here in Japan. His scheduled arrival time was 6:15, actually landed at 6:24, and finally got through customs and everything around 7:19. So we were stuck in the airport waiting for him, because we had his JR Pass that would let him get on the train 'for free'. While waiting, we were interrogated by the police, I think because we were a bunch of foreigners with a lot of luggage looking like we were just lazing about in one spot for a few hours. The police officer somehow had singled me out from the beginning, somehow.. or maybe I indicated I did by speaking first when he addressed the group? I dunno, but I ended up being the one talking to him, which wasn't so bad. Basically just asking us simple things like who here spoke Japanese, are all these bags ours, what country are we from, are we here for business/pleasure.. I don't think he was suspicious of anything, just curious. At the very end, he said 'なんとなく', which I had to look up.. but other than that, I held the conversation rather well I think. Jim followed along and understood what was going on, the rest looked confused because they don't know Japanese. :P
We got on the narita express, got off at tokyo, exited the station, walked over to the marunouchi train line, and got turned away - oops, kanda's on yamanote. Back in to the JR station we went (the station guard probably thought we were all idiots), got on the correct train, walked a few blocks, and we were at the hotel! People's spirits are mildly low, but not terrible, but a lot of us are cranky by now. Which is completely different from being Crunky, which I intend to go purchase soon. Ignoring that last sentence, we checked in - they had combined our complex arrangements to avoid room shuffling, which was good because I was going to ask if they could and they already had, so only one room needs to be shuffled tomorrow, instead of 3 (there were limited openings for the rooms with two beds, so tonight only got placed on one reservation, then another for 4 days, then skip a day for a kansai trip, then two reservations for the rest of the days - one for group A, leaving net week, one for group Awesome, which includes me, leaving the week afterward.)
But we all managed to get in our rooms, figure out how to turn on the electronics, etc., then went for food - cocoichi curry! I didn't realize the one near here was so small, otherwise I'd probably not have suggested it.. i thought there was additional seating, but it turns out there were 10 bar-style seats, 6 in one group, four in another, so they had to turn away a few people while we clogged the place up. I felt somewhat bad about that. Everyone seemed to enjoy their food though, so back to the hotel for everyone, then Jim and I started wandering around. We didn't find much, but apparently if you want a massage, kanda station is a pretty good place to get one. I had (#UNDEF) more offerings (percentage-wise) in one hour last night than I have had in all of my days up until today. Going from 0 to 4 in one hour was weird.
Which brings me to my final point - what the hell happened to my gaijin shields? It's like the forward deflectors are at about 5% capacity, does the colored hair not scare you? My obvious whiteness? My tallness? The person next to me (tattooed, pierced, tall, etc.) I got more random approaches (the police officer, the massage girls, etc.) than I would have expected. Perhaps last night's phase of the moon (whatever it was) is to blame, but it was weird. I was just marveling to myself for a while about how strange it was to actually have people try and talk to me (even if it is for offerings of massage), instead of just assume I don't know Japanese and thus skip over me entirely. Also, every time I've asked so far about people understanding English, they've often responded with 'a little bit', as opposed to the 'no' you usually get. After the 'no', speak english anyway, just slower between words - they'll very likely know the vocabulary, so you can still get by. ;)
But yeah, it's 6:33 in the morning and now I'm wide awake, whereas after our little walking adventure (which was supposed to have been longer, we had only come back to get directions somewhere), I just passed out on the bed. But only for 4.5 hours. boo.
Tomorrow's our first real day, let's see what happens..