It Feels So Good, Even If We Feel So Bad.
Despite the fact that we feel like we just got hit by a bullet train, it still feels great to be back in Japan!! This time however we are on our own, and don’t have our friend Noah to help us navigate the train system. The Narita express airport train is a no-brainer. But once we arrived at our station in Tokyo, it was a whole other story. There are two different stations on the same block, and in one station there are about 4 floors of platforms and umpteen-thousand different lines. Maybe it was just that we weren’t operating at 100% but we spent over an hour trying to figure out how to get to our hotel that wasn’t even that far away. We made every rookie mistake in the book. Buying the wrong tickets. Almost getting on the wrong train. Walking down the wrong stairs. Second guessing ourselves. Running out of money for the right tickets. Oh yeah. Good times.
Eventually after trying to track down an ATM that would accept our foreign cards, we wandered into a hotel to ask for help and ended up just hailing a cab. Turns out we could have walked there from the train station.
In fact… later that night we practically DID walk there, and back. Some of our Japanese friends met us at our hotel, and against our better judgment convinced us to grab some dinner and beeru’s at our favorite yakitori restaurant. We had a great time catching up with them over some great food. Somehow, sitting and laughing with close friends with some warm food in our bellies made the whole 10 hour trip (from a country that is only 2 hours away by plane) all worth it, and all our troubles and stress just melted away.
Tomorrow will be better.
