The Road Less Traveled

Tokyo, Comic Market, and New Years – Day 1: Getting there

Thursday, January 29th, 2009 by Rintaun | Uncategorized

Well hello again! Sorry it’s taken me so long to update my blog again, but now that we’re finally done with classes, I’ll hopefully be able to get caught up pretty soon. Yeah, our last classes were on Tuesday. We’re pretty much free until Feb. 19th, when we start orientation for our Asuke cultural trip. We’ll actually go to Asuke on the 21st, and get back on Mar. 2nd. Until — and after — then, I’m free. So I’m pretty sure the last thing I wrote about was Christmas. Well, I suppose I’ll just go in order and write about my trip to Tokyo. Here goes…

We booked our trip to Tokyo pretty early in November, so when Christmas rolled around, Mike Marion and I started getting ready to go. After what seemed an eternity, the 27th finally arrived, and we left for our trip to Tokyo, and to the world’s biggest comic convention, Comic Market. We left pretty early that day; we had to be to Nagoya Station by 8:40am, which mean that we had to be out of the dorm and on our way to the train station by, at the latest, 7:30am. And so we were. In retrospect, the bus that runs between Chubu and the train station started at 8am, so we could’ve taken that (and been much less cold), but then, I suppose as they say, hindsight is always 20/20.

In any case, unlike the time we walked to the station for the JLPT, got lost, and ended up nearly missing the exam (on a related note, we should be getting our results to the test before we go to Asuke, hopefully), this time we knew the route to the station. As such, we didn’t get lost, which is good, because we didn’t plan a lot of downtime between leaving, getting to the station, getting on the train, getting to Nagoya station, and checking in for the bus we’d be taking to Tokyo.

When we got to the train station at about 8:00am, Mike realized that he’d forgotten all of his money back at the dorm. We panicked for a second, trying to figure out what to do, then thought we might barely be able to make it if got on the bus to the school, ran to the dorm, got his money, and ran back to take the bus back to the station… but as I said above, we didn’t plan a lot of downtime between when we left and when we needed to check in for the bus.

I made a quick decision to loan Mike the money he was going to bring with him to Tokyo. I’d take the money out of the first ATM we found, we he’d just give me the money back when we got back to the university. Disaster neatly averted, though there was a small amount of panicking that slipped in before the resolution. And so, no longer freaking out, we boarded the train to Nagoya. It’s about a 30 minute ride, so we got there around 8:30am.

We needed to find the check in location for the bus and actually check in by maybe 8:50am, which would then give us a little bit of time to get settled on the bus before 9:00am, when the bus was scheduled to leave. We had a little bit of trouble finding the entrance to the underground shopping arcade where the check in location was (another example of hindsight being 20/20 — there were entrances basically everywhere), but once we found it, we checked in without a problem, grabbed something quick at McDonalds, and made our way to the bus, which was on the street above.

The bus left a little bit late, but at that point, there was nothing we could do, so we just sat back and enjoyed the ride — though mostly, that’s just a figure of speech. The bus ride was about 6 hours total, and we stopped every 2 hours at a rest area for 15 minutes for a bathroom break. Other than that, it was pretty uneventful an boring, though as we’d find out later, it was much, much better than the night bus that we’d be taking on the way home.

We arrived in Shinjuku (for those not in the know, this is one of the major subsections of Tokyo) sometime between 2:30pm and 3:00pm — I don’t really remember the exact time. From there we had to get on a train at Shinjuku Station (the busiest train station in the world, though I only find that out now looking at the Wikipedia article — it didn’t seem THAT busy to me…) to go to Koto Ward, one of the other major subsections of Tokyo, though rather less famous. Koto Ward is where the convention we’d be going to, Comic Market, and our hotel were located.

We followed directions that I got from Google Maps from Shinjuku to our hotel… they weren’t very good, to be honest. On the way home, we’d become much, much better at navigating Tokyo on the Tokyo Metro subway system, and found it was significantly cheaper — and faster! — to take the subways to Shinjuku station from our hotel than it was to take two different trains and a subway, then walk quite a bit further to get to the hotel. But on the way there, we didn’t know any better, so we spent about an hour getting to our final stop, and then started walking the mile or so hike to our hotel. Of course, we made a wrong turn on the way — entirely my fault — and ended up walking about 3 or 4 times what we should have, but eventually, we got to the hotel — though a little bit later than originally planned. We checked in, went up to the room, and left our stuff.

We then went down to the front desk and asked them about restaurants in the area — we wanted pizza, but it turns out there weren’t any pizza places around. We did find out later that we could’ve gotten it delivered, but we never actually did. In all honesty, I forget where we actually ended up eating that night. It could’ve been McDonald’s — we ate there quite a bit while we were in Tokyo — but I get the feeling that we were looking for something else. Oh well. After dinner we went back to the hotel and crashed for the night. And that pretty much ends part one of our trip… the next day we were getting up bright and early to go to Comic Market.

But that’s a story for another post. See you later!

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