SPRING BREAK TOKYO! Monday
LIVEJOURNAL WHY THE HELL AREN'T MY HTML TAGS WORKING RIGHT? GRRRRR! *fumes*
Ahem. Anyway.
Yay, our first day in Tokyo!!!!1!1!1!!one!1!!1!1ichi!!1!uno!!111!!!11!
We had to get up hella early to walk to the bus stop to get to the station to get to Kyoto to get to Kyoto Station from which the shinkansen departs. My alarm went off at 6:45 because I don’t believe in being late and it got a few pushes of the snooze button and then got reset for 7:20, when we finally made ourselves get up. It was a struggle, let me tell you! But we finally got up and got to the bus.
Actually, considering we had to switch train lines a few times to get to Kyoto Station, we did things perfectly except for when we went out te wtong station exit at Tambabashi and couldn't get back in without a ticket so we had to wander around outside and find another entrance to the station. We got to Kyoto Eki in one piece and voila! Shinkansen central. For the record, the shinkansen are cool. And fast. And quiet. And kind of feel like planes inside. I kept wanting to put on a seatbelt or something.
Look, it's the shinkansen!
There were a fair amount of people already on the shinkansen since it wasn’t the first stop for the train, but Liz and I still managed to get seats together, sitting right next to a pretty boy that was dead asleep. I think we kind of startled him a little while later when he woke up and there were two strange gaijin girls blocking his escape to the aisle. But then he got off somewhere close (Nagoya, maybe?) and we moved over to the window seat. Windows! For a while it was all kinds of exciting looking at all the strange things in Japan zooming by, and I amused myself trying to take pictures of the shinkansen passing in the opposite direction (it didn’t work so well, because you get a big WHAM sound and the train shakes and then by the time you get your camera on and up, the shinkansen has already passed. Took me a lot of tries, and when I finally got a picture, it was a really crappy one). XD But then we started going through lots of tunnels and I got bored because I had nothing to see so I dozed and Liz… sat there. Ha ha. Anyway.
Then we got to Tokyo, Tokyo! We grabbed our stuff, dug our tickets back out, and marched through the ticket gate. Only the ticket gate decided that it wanted to give our tickets back to us for some strange reason, to which we replied: o.O;; I was so surprised that it took me a minute to reach for my ticket and then the machine sucked it back down right before my fingers closed over the space where it had been. Sad face! But one of the attendant ladies ran over and opened it up and rescued my ticket. So, confused as to why we had the tickets back but kinda glad that we did, we marched onward toward whichever big exit was in front of us (slash went to transfer lines but didn’t have tickets for that one so we found an exit to go out and buy tickets for it so we wouldn’t have to brave the fare readjustment machine once we got to our destination).
Then we came to another ticket gate.
We had NO idea what to do kind of a recurring theme on this trip. So we stood around, stared at it, eyeballed the people going through and the machine and the fare adjustment thing and the security guard, and then finally sucked it up and tried sticking our magical tickets of awesomeness through. It worked and we were free! But then came our first real introduction to the subway and JR maps of Tokyo. We kind of stared at it for a minute, laughed, and then turned around and went outside so we wouldn’t have to deal with it yet. Best tactic ever for avoiding something, you know: run awaaaaaaaaaay!
There was a lot of walking involved in this day. First of all, the station was ginormous and we walked all over it looking for a specific exit to find… something that I can’t remember. But we couldn’t seem to find said something, instead discovering the government offices that are happy little neighbors with the station. We walked past them, found a waterfall park, and plopped down to plot out what we were doing. While we were deliberating slash sitting there and resting our poor little footsies, lots of other gaijin wandered through the park (and one group of them had a camera pointed directly at us from across the bridge… stalker, much?) we have NO room to talk what with the pictures of random pretty boys that we take like stalkers XD. Well, we sat, stared at the palace wall, and sat, and then randomly started wandering. Only a couple of seconds into our wandering, we caught sight of the mecca of middleschool fieldtrips and destruction by aliens, bombs, Godzilla, and everything else that destroys Tokyo: TOKYO TOWER.
And, of course, us being us and susceptible to stupid tourist traps, we HAD to go. It didn’t look THAT far away, and my duffel bag was hurting my shoulder but not killing me THAT much, right? Right.
So we walked.
For an hour. Quite possibly more. Just walked and walked and walked. The sad thing, we weren’t even planning on going inside! I had my big duffel bag of doom and Liz had her bag of slightly less doomness but still not a good thing to take into the Towerness and we were just walking that way because it was the Tower and it was There. Finally we got there, waved goodbye at it, and turned toward the nearest easiest to find station, Daimon. Halfway there I suggested dumping our stuff in a locker there and going back to the Tower, since, you know, we were already THERE and it was pointless go come back ALL the way across the city, so we did. The lockers themselves were an adventure because, while they were only 300 yen, we could not figure out for the life of us how LONG you could keep your stuff there for 300 yen (probably didn’t help that the signs were all in Japanese and I was WAY too lazy to look up all of that furigana-less kanji). So, after more standing and staring at the lockers (I’m telling you, we do this a LOT), we stuck our stuff in, paid the fee, and walked away, intending to come back by 4:30 because there was something on one of the signs about 9:00-4:30.
Back to the Tower we walked, taking about fifty gazillion pictures of it. Except there was a temple at the foot of the Tower and the maps showed that you could go through said Temple, and we were tired and didn’t feel like going around but weren’t really sure at all that we could in fact go through and still get to the Tower, so we stood for a moment, eyeballed it, and then went through slash walked through part of the grounds and then found a street that we needed to be on to get to the Tower anyway. The Tower itself was… kinda slightly smaller than I had imagined. xD But we paid our 800 yen to get up to the main observation floor (bypassing the wax museum, five hundred stores, and basically everything else random you can think of to put in the Tokyo Tower). It was… well, not ALL that great, but DUDE, it was the TOKYO TOWER. You just HAVE to love it. But we were too cheap to pay the extra 1200 or whatever to get up to the special observation deck. We met some Canadians in a tour group there and made one of them take our picture. They informed us that they were there for the Figure Skating Championships, to which we said: Whaaaa? They’re in Tokyo? They’re NOW? Oh. Interesting. XD
Things seen from the Tower.
So once our Tower need was fulfilled and we had been highway robbed on the souvenirs, we walked back to Daimon and decided to start trying to find our ryokan. TRYING is the key word, here. I knew which station to go to and which line we needed to get there and I had some crappy directions written off of a crappy map from the internet (Japan, WHY do you not have street names!?) aaaaaaand we had no idea where the actual ryokan was. We got off at the correct station and set off in pursuit of the ryokan, and it took about 45 minutes of wandering around the neighborhoods of Asakusabashi for us to FINALLY start seeing signs for the youth hostel on the poles. Blar! But we dropped off our stuff and then collapsed down onto our still folded-up futon and just laid there staring at the ceiling until we A. got hungry enough to actually move and B. started feeling guilty for being in Tokyo and not doing anything of value. So we got up and went to...
McDonald’s. (Totally off the subject here, but I am currently typing on a Japanese keyboard and it took me a really long time to find the apostrophe, and the buttons are about as far from super special awesome as it is possible to get. o.o;;) But yes. Good old MacuDo. Yay, Kansai dialect! You make life cooler, that you do! SPEAKING of Kansai, in Tokyo they stand on the opposite sides of escalators. Like, in the Kansai region we stand on the right side of the escalator so the people who want to go fast can pass on out left. But in the Kantou region it’s backwards, you stand on the left and walk on the right. They’re backwards people in Tokyo, I’m telling you! Totally ignoring the fact that Osaka is the "backwards" "hick" part of Japan.
Well, after MacuDo we went to Ueno! Good old Ueno. It was like a second home to us this week. *uber tear of reminiscence* Except, we didn’t mean to go to Ueno, it just kind of happened. See, we wanted something to do. Asakusabashi was, well, kind of suburb-like, and all the stores and stuff had closed for the evening. But we still had a number of hours to kill before our ryokan’s curfew, so I suggested going to Asakusa because I SWEAR I’ve heard something about it before. So we went and...
Nothing.
I mean REALLY, there was NOTHING. Well, there was a giant golden sperm on top of a building, and there was a nice, big shopping arcade that reminded me of Osaka and Kyoto, but it was CLOSED. SRSLY, I was staring around me asking why, if we were in a big part of Tokyo, there were no PEOPLE. It got actually QUIET for a few seconds with no close people and no close cars. IT WAS FREAKISH LIKE THE TWILIGHT ZONE, I TELL YOU! And so... we walked.
And walked.
And walked.
We randomly found a largish (but still quite not full of the throngs of people that I wanted to find) street and just started following it, figuring that we would have to come to a station at some point and once we were tired (HA! Like we weren’t about to fall over already!) and we could just go home. Well, we did indeed stumble upon a station, and a big one on the Yamanote line at that: our darling kokoro no tomodachi, Ueno eki. Buuuuuuut, even though we were DED, we didn’t want to throw in the towel when we had FINALLY found LIFE after almost two hours of walking, so we headed for the bright, flashy buildings and all they had to offer.
The first store we went in was a store of... awesomeness, really. It was the most random mix of toys and things ever. But I found a Bubble Man II pencil case! (For those of you not in the know [which is probably everyone who isn’t in Japan], it’s this nifty 100 yen drink of awesomeness from the nifty 100 yen vending machines that I found ONCE and then it VANISHED INTO THE WIND. I still have the can sitting on my shelf in the dorm. I really want to find a way to take it home with me. XP) And Liz bought a Death Note folder. Yay, L! Yay, Raito! XDD So THEN we kept wandering, because we’re CRAZAY. There were lots of bright and shiny things (which equaled me in my happy place, ya know). But our wanderings brought us Heaven in the form of our first glimpse of the huge, gorgeous, super special awesome billboards of one Kamenashi Kazuya that are EVERYWHERE in Tokyo. Well, once we exhausted the brightest of the buildings, we turned down a cheery, people-filled street leading off of the one we were on.
About thirty seconds later, our footsteps slowed and we turned to stare at each other, both having noticed the same thing at the same time. There were lots of men, lots of really HOT men, all dressed up in hot suits and being all Japanese in their hotness. And there were some women, all dressed up all fancy and standing in little groups near the entrances of the flashing buildings. Only, we were the only girls actually walking down the street, the only people not all dressed up and cool like that...
Yep.
We found the host clubs.
Now, we kept moving while trying not to burst out into laughter and thus earn ourselves even more strange looks than we had already gotten, but we didn’t really know what to do. We weren’t exactly close to the exit of the street any more, and we were left with two options. One: turn around and go back the way we came, looking like total idiots and completely retarded gaijin. Two: keep going down the street like me meant to be there. So we picked the second option, casually picking the first turn off of the street as soon as we could manage it. Then we got back to safety, giggled like maniacs, and decided that we had had enough for the night. So we hiked back to Ueno eki, did some more train hopping, and returned to collapse into our futon. It’s probably a good thing that we got kicked out of the ryokan at 10am, or else we would likely have slept forever!
So that was our Monday in Tokyo. I've uploaded my pictures for the trip, and they can be found here, here, and here. All right, I think that's all for that day. Now it's Liz's turn to post about Tuesday. XD
Tags, If you don't work after I manually fixed you, there will be DETH. *shakes fist*
Ahem. Anyway.
Yay, our first day in Tokyo!!!!1!1!1!!one!1!!1!1ichi!!1!uno!!111!!!11!
We had to get up hella early to walk to the bus stop to get to the station to get to Kyoto to get to Kyoto Station from which the shinkansen departs. My alarm went off at 6:45 because I don’t believe in being late and it got a few pushes of the snooze button and then got reset for 7:20, when we finally made ourselves get up. It was a struggle, let me tell you! But we finally got up and got to the bus.
Actually, considering we had to switch train lines a few times to get to Kyoto Station, we did things perfectly except for when we went out te wtong station exit at Tambabashi and couldn't get back in without a ticket so we had to wander around outside and find another entrance to the station. We got to Kyoto Eki in one piece and voila! Shinkansen central. For the record, the shinkansen are cool. And fast. And quiet. And kind of feel like planes inside. I kept wanting to put on a seatbelt or something.
Look, it's the shinkansen!
There were a fair amount of people already on the shinkansen since it wasn’t the first stop for the train, but Liz and I still managed to get seats together, sitting right next to a pretty boy that was dead asleep. I think we kind of startled him a little while later when he woke up and there were two strange gaijin girls blocking his escape to the aisle. But then he got off somewhere close (Nagoya, maybe?) and we moved over to the window seat. Windows! For a while it was all kinds of exciting looking at all the strange things in Japan zooming by, and I amused myself trying to take pictures of the shinkansen passing in the opposite direction (it didn’t work so well, because you get a big WHAM sound and the train shakes and then by the time you get your camera on and up, the shinkansen has already passed. Took me a lot of tries, and when I finally got a picture, it was a really crappy one). XD But then we started going through lots of tunnels and I got bored because I had nothing to see so I dozed and Liz… sat there. Ha ha. Anyway.
Then we got to Tokyo, Tokyo! We grabbed our stuff, dug our tickets back out, and marched through the ticket gate. Only the ticket gate decided that it wanted to give our tickets back to us for some strange reason, to which we replied: o.O;; I was so surprised that it took me a minute to reach for my ticket and then the machine sucked it back down right before my fingers closed over the space where it had been. Sad face! But one of the attendant ladies ran over and opened it up and rescued my ticket. So, confused as to why we had the tickets back but kinda glad that we did, we marched onward toward whichever big exit was in front of us (slash went to transfer lines but didn’t have tickets for that one so we found an exit to go out and buy tickets for it so we wouldn’t have to brave the fare readjustment machine once we got to our destination).
Then we came to another ticket gate.
We had NO idea what to do kind of a recurring theme on this trip. So we stood around, stared at it, eyeballed the people going through and the machine and the fare adjustment thing and the security guard, and then finally sucked it up and tried sticking our magical tickets of awesomeness through. It worked and we were free! But then came our first real introduction to the subway and JR maps of Tokyo. We kind of stared at it for a minute, laughed, and then turned around and went outside so we wouldn’t have to deal with it yet. Best tactic ever for avoiding something, you know: run awaaaaaaaaaay!
There was a lot of walking involved in this day. First of all, the station was ginormous and we walked all over it looking for a specific exit to find… something that I can’t remember. But we couldn’t seem to find said something, instead discovering the government offices that are happy little neighbors with the station. We walked past them, found a waterfall park, and plopped down to plot out what we were doing. While we were deliberating slash sitting there and resting our poor little footsies, lots of other gaijin wandered through the park (and one group of them had a camera pointed directly at us from across the bridge… stalker, much?) we have NO room to talk what with the pictures of random pretty boys that we take like stalkers XD. Well, we sat, stared at the palace wall, and sat, and then randomly started wandering. Only a couple of seconds into our wandering, we caught sight of the mecca of middleschool fieldtrips and destruction by aliens, bombs, Godzilla, and everything else that destroys Tokyo: TOKYO TOWER.
And, of course, us being us and susceptible to stupid tourist traps, we HAD to go. It didn’t look THAT far away, and my duffel bag was hurting my shoulder but not killing me THAT much, right? Right.
So we walked.
For an hour. Quite possibly more. Just walked and walked and walked. The sad thing, we weren’t even planning on going inside! I had my big duffel bag of doom and Liz had her bag of slightly less doomness but still not a good thing to take into the Towerness and we were just walking that way because it was the Tower and it was There. Finally we got there, waved goodbye at it, and turned toward the nearest easiest to find station, Daimon. Halfway there I suggested dumping our stuff in a locker there and going back to the Tower, since, you know, we were already THERE and it was pointless go come back ALL the way across the city, so we did. The lockers themselves were an adventure because, while they were only 300 yen, we could not figure out for the life of us how LONG you could keep your stuff there for 300 yen (probably didn’t help that the signs were all in Japanese and I was WAY too lazy to look up all of that furigana-less kanji). So, after more standing and staring at the lockers (I’m telling you, we do this a LOT), we stuck our stuff in, paid the fee, and walked away, intending to come back by 4:30 because there was something on one of the signs about 9:00-4:30.
Back to the Tower we walked, taking about fifty gazillion pictures of it. Except there was a temple at the foot of the Tower and the maps showed that you could go through said Temple, and we were tired and didn’t feel like going around but weren’t really sure at all that we could in fact go through and still get to the Tower, so we stood for a moment, eyeballed it, and then went through slash walked through part of the grounds and then found a street that we needed to be on to get to the Tower anyway. The Tower itself was… kinda slightly smaller than I had imagined. xD But we paid our 800 yen to get up to the main observation floor (bypassing the wax museum, five hundred stores, and basically everything else random you can think of to put in the Tokyo Tower). It was… well, not ALL that great, but DUDE, it was the TOKYO TOWER. You just HAVE to love it. But we were too cheap to pay the extra 1200 or whatever to get up to the special observation deck. We met some Canadians in a tour group there and made one of them take our picture. They informed us that they were there for the Figure Skating Championships, to which we said: Whaaaa? They’re in Tokyo? They’re NOW? Oh. Interesting. XD
Things seen from the Tower.
So once our Tower need was fulfilled and we had been highway robbed on the souvenirs, we walked back to Daimon and decided to start trying to find our ryokan. TRYING is the key word, here. I knew which station to go to and which line we needed to get there and I had some crappy directions written off of a crappy map from the internet (Japan, WHY do you not have street names!?) aaaaaaand we had no idea where the actual ryokan was. We got off at the correct station and set off in pursuit of the ryokan, and it took about 45 minutes of wandering around the neighborhoods of Asakusabashi for us to FINALLY start seeing signs for the youth hostel on the poles. Blar! But we dropped off our stuff and then collapsed down onto our still folded-up futon and just laid there staring at the ceiling until we A. got hungry enough to actually move and B. started feeling guilty for being in Tokyo and not doing anything of value. So we got up and went to...
McDonald’s. (Totally off the subject here, but I am currently typing on a Japanese keyboard and it took me a really long time to find the apostrophe, and the buttons are about as far from super special awesome as it is possible to get. o.o;;) But yes. Good old MacuDo. Yay, Kansai dialect! You make life cooler, that you do! SPEAKING of Kansai, in Tokyo they stand on the opposite sides of escalators. Like, in the Kansai region we stand on the right side of the escalator so the people who want to go fast can pass on out left. But in the Kantou region it’s backwards, you stand on the left and walk on the right. They’re backwards people in Tokyo, I’m telling you! Totally ignoring the fact that Osaka is the "backwards" "hick" part of Japan.
Well, after MacuDo we went to Ueno! Good old Ueno. It was like a second home to us this week. *uber tear of reminiscence* Except, we didn’t mean to go to Ueno, it just kind of happened. See, we wanted something to do. Asakusabashi was, well, kind of suburb-like, and all the stores and stuff had closed for the evening. But we still had a number of hours to kill before our ryokan’s curfew, so I suggested going to Asakusa because I SWEAR I’ve heard something about it before. So we went and...
Nothing.
I mean REALLY, there was NOTHING. Well, there was a giant golden sperm on top of a building, and there was a nice, big shopping arcade that reminded me of Osaka and Kyoto, but it was CLOSED. SRSLY, I was staring around me asking why, if we were in a big part of Tokyo, there were no PEOPLE. It got actually QUIET for a few seconds with no close people and no close cars. IT WAS FREAKISH LIKE THE TWILIGHT ZONE, I TELL YOU! And so... we walked.
And walked.
And walked.
We randomly found a largish (but still quite not full of the throngs of people that I wanted to find) street and just started following it, figuring that we would have to come to a station at some point and once we were tired (HA! Like we weren’t about to fall over already!) and we could just go home. Well, we did indeed stumble upon a station, and a big one on the Yamanote line at that: our darling kokoro no tomodachi, Ueno eki. Buuuuuuut, even though we were DED, we didn’t want to throw in the towel when we had FINALLY found LIFE after almost two hours of walking, so we headed for the bright, flashy buildings and all they had to offer.
The first store we went in was a store of... awesomeness, really. It was the most random mix of toys and things ever. But I found a Bubble Man II pencil case! (For those of you not in the know [which is probably everyone who isn’t in Japan], it’s this nifty 100 yen drink of awesomeness from the nifty 100 yen vending machines that I found ONCE and then it VANISHED INTO THE WIND. I still have the can sitting on my shelf in the dorm. I really want to find a way to take it home with me. XP) And Liz bought a Death Note folder. Yay, L! Yay, Raito! XDD So THEN we kept wandering, because we’re CRAZAY. There were lots of bright and shiny things (which equaled me in my happy place, ya know). But our wanderings brought us Heaven in the form of our first glimpse of the huge, gorgeous, super special awesome billboards of one Kamenashi Kazuya that are EVERYWHERE in Tokyo. Well, once we exhausted the brightest of the buildings, we turned down a cheery, people-filled street leading off of the one we were on.
About thirty seconds later, our footsteps slowed and we turned to stare at each other, both having noticed the same thing at the same time. There were lots of men, lots of really HOT men, all dressed up in hot suits and being all Japanese in their hotness. And there were some women, all dressed up all fancy and standing in little groups near the entrances of the flashing buildings. Only, we were the only girls actually walking down the street, the only people not all dressed up and cool like that...
Yep.
We found the host clubs.
Now, we kept moving while trying not to burst out into laughter and thus earn ourselves even more strange looks than we had already gotten, but we didn’t really know what to do. We weren’t exactly close to the exit of the street any more, and we were left with two options. One: turn around and go back the way we came, looking like total idiots and completely retarded gaijin. Two: keep going down the street like me meant to be there. So we picked the second option, casually picking the first turn off of the street as soon as we could manage it. Then we got back to safety, giggled like maniacs, and decided that we had had enough for the night. So we hiked back to Ueno eki, did some more train hopping, and returned to collapse into our futon. It’s probably a good thing that we got kicked out of the ryokan at 10am, or else we would likely have slept forever!
So that was our Monday in Tokyo. I've uploaded my pictures for the trip, and they can be found here, here, and here. All right, I think that's all for that day. Now it's Liz's turn to post about Tuesday. XD
Tags, If you don't work after I manually fixed you, there will be DETH. *shakes fist*