The Road Less Traveled

Tokyo, Comic Market, and New Years – Day 5: Sightseeing the right way and the wrong way

Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 by Matthew Lanigan | Uncategorized

Well I figured that since I missed a day before, I might as well just make it look like I was doing it on purpose by making a pattern out of it. I assure you that I didn’t just forget about it after having a long day spent at an elementary school in the next town over, being harassed by tons of small children at an “English-language event” they were holding. I also assure you that today, I didn’t hear how tall I was a million times, and I didn’t just realize exactly how tall young children perceive adults to be, especially when said children are about half the size of children of equal age in the United States.

So now that we’re clear on what did and didn’t actually happen (though I was becoming a bit unsure of it myself as I wrote that last bit), we’ve finally arrived at the tale of my last day in Tokyo. I’m sorry if I built it up too much, because it was really rather boring. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it was a lot of fun at the time, but in retrospect, it was a lot of browsing through random stores, window shopping, and other similarly (fun at the time but boring in the retelling)-type stories (yes, that’s meant to be one word). So instead of just getting straight to the [not so] juicy part, I’m going to tell about just what I learned about sightseeing. To ruin a good (not really) story, good sightseeing is all about having a plan. Which of course we didn’t.

Our plan for the last day of our trip was basically to take our time getting up and getting ready, eat breakfast, get packed, and check out of the hotel at 10:00am, the hotel’s final check out time. Luckily, we were able to check our luggage with the hotel, so we didn’t have to lug it around all over Tokyo until our bus departed at 11:00pm-ish that night.

So we left at about 10:05am after doing the above, which left us about 8 hours to play with, allowing for ample time getting lost finding the bus and eating dinner. So, we decided, we’d gone all that way to Tokyo, why not do some sightseeing! We listed off the famous areas of Tokyo that we’d heard of, picked Shibuya, and hopped on the subway. I think I mentioned this before, but over the previous four days, we’d gotten pretty adept at navigating the city by the Tokyo Metro. It’s really rather easy if you can read Japanese and understand how the lines work.

So we got to Shibuya. And we were rather disappointed. We wandered around for a while, but really didn’t find anything that interesting. This was our first hint that wandering around a city without a plan doesn’t really lend itself well to becoming a fun sightseeing trip. I mean, we did see places that we’d never seen before, but it wasn’t anything special, really. So after a while we decided to move on and try another part of Tokyo. It ended up pretty much the same as Shibuya. Honestly, both were so uneventful and uninteresting that they’re all mixed together in my head, and I don’t even remember properly whether we went to Shibuya first or second, and even what the other place was. It might’ve been Harajuku, but pulling up pictures on Google Images doesn’t ring any bells.

In any case, it was about that time when I basically just gave up and said “Look, we know where interesting places are in Akihabara. You bought a guide book on it, so if all else fails, we have that to fall back on. Plus, it’s a town that has things we are specifically interested in.” Not in so many words, mind you. In reality, it was something like “Let’s just go to Akiba.” To which Mike basically responded “Okay.”

So we gave up trying to “sightsee” and instead just went to see what we could see of the town we’d now been to twice, but never really got to look around thoroughly. And we spent the next five or six hours basically doing just that. We went into who knows how many manga/doujin shops (doujin is basically independently-published stuff), a couple different arcades, and we had a lot of fun doing it. I spent maybe another fifty dollars, but it wasn’t very much compared to what I’d spent at Comic Market. But all’s well that ends well, to some extent at least, and I still was a couple hundred dollars under budget all told.

Around 7:30pm, after having spent hours wandering around Akihabara, not really purchasing anything of extreme note, and having a lot of fun just browsing various stores for hours on end and basking in the culture, we made our way to the station and started going to Shinjuku, where we had to check in to our bus by 10:40pm. You may wonder why we left so early… well, if you do, I doubt that you’ve been properly keeping up with the previous entries on this little story of my life. Most recently was barely making it to the bus to come to Tokyo, but also before that was us making it into the Japanese Language Proficiency Test with oh, about 30 seconds to spare. Me and Mike (don’t bother correcting my grammar) have a history of near misses, and I would much rather show up somewhere hours early and be safe than I would almost miss, or (knock on wood) actually miss something important.

Of course this ended up being the former. We were hours early, because again, we’d become rather proficient at navigating the city over these few short days, so we went to a nearby McDonald’s, got some food, sat down at the way-too-cramped tables in a way-too-crowded restaurant and ate dinner. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, between Akihabara and Shinjuku, we actually stopped back at our hotel to pick up our luggage. Luckily we didn’t forget to do that. So not only was this particular McDonalds, right outside of Shinjuku Station, the busiest train station in the world, too crowded and too cramped, but we also had quite a bit of luggage. All in all it was a rather cumbersome time, and adding to that the fact that we sat there for close to an hour and a half or more, it was pretty uncomfortable.

Finally, though, we left the McDonald’s when it got close to the time for our bus to leave, and we found the bus without TOO much trouble, checked in, got on, and had a much less fun ride back to Nagoya than we had a ride to Tokyo. If you’re ever in Japan and have a choice between a day bus and a night bus, and it doesn’t particularly matter which one you take, definitely pick the day bus. The night bus has several downsides to it… one: it’s an all-night ride, so pretty much, you need to sleep if you want to function at all the next day; two: the seats are generally pretty small, so you’re pretty much too cramped to sleep; three: I don’t know if this applies to every night bus, but at least on ours, they turned the heat up to “Hell”, which made it even more difficult to sleep; and not finally, but I’m going to stop listing the bad parts here, because it’s depressing for both you and me, four: the bus stops every two hours for a bathroom break, making very sure that you are quite awake after getting up, walking out in the freezing cold, emptying your bladder, walking through the freezing col AGAIN, and getting back on the insanely hot, cramped bus, only to sit there for thirty minutes after the alotted fifteen minutes for the break has passed with no explanation or apology or even acknowledgment that anything was happening, or rather in this case, very specifically NOT happening.

Well, sorry for that little rant there. To sum up the bus ride back, though, it kinda sucked. We ended up getting back to Nagoya station around 7:30am, got on a train back to Kasugai, only to find out that the school bus wasn’t running because it was New Years. Yeah, in case you hadn’t realized that, we spent New Years Eve rather uneventfully on a bus between Tokyo and Nagoya. In any case, that particular fact didn’t bother either of us too much. Having to walk several miles back to the dorm from the train station in the freezing cold while carrying all of our luggage, however, did. Just a little bit though.

To make a long walk short, we eventually got back and went to sleep in our own beds. And that pretty much ends the story of my trip to Tokyo, if a bit anticlimactically. Hey, you can’t expect every story I tell to be a masterpiece…

Well, it was fun writing this. Hopefully it won’t be another month before I write the next bit. What is the next bit, anyway? Can anyone remind me? I always say I’m going to write about things at the end of my posts, but I’m pretty sure that I pretty much then never write about those things. That could be a bit of a flawed recollection on my part, though. I’m trying to go over it in my head… I guess I’ve pretty much covered everything. There was also the Coming-of-Age ceremony this past January, but it wasn’t really anything to write home about (which, now that I think of it, is kinda exactly what this blog is — writing home about things). I did talk about it on the phone, however, and I might write up a short post about the whole thing just to show off pictures of me in a kimono — assuming you haven’t seen them already, which I know some of you have.

Okay, well, I’m about to hit the 1700 word mark, and that’s significantly more than double my post for day 4 of our trip, and I said that this day was boring! So here’s 1699. Goodbye for now!

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