Advertisement
Published: January 27th 2014
Edit Blog Post
I left early morning to get the train from Hakata (Fukuoka) on Kyushu island and arrived in Tokyo about 5pm. I had arranged to meet my friend Joe in central Tokyo at the Hachiko dog statue outside Shibuya station, with the plan of having a coffee with him and taking the sleeper train from Tokyo at 7pm up to Hokkaido in the far north of Japan. I really wanted to see Joe as we haven’t seen each other in a few years and wanting to make the most of my train pass and see the entire island I really wanted to visit it but I hadn’t realised how tiring the travelling was going to be. Really I didn’t have enough energy to do both but I was determined not to miss out on a fabulous opportunity!
I went to meet Joe not realising that he was no longer able to make it, and as I couldn’t get a wifi connection anywhere in the area I couldn’t see his message cancelling the trip. I arrived at the Hachiko dog (the statue is there because when the dog’s master died the dog returned to that spot,) but Joe was not there L. I went to Mcdonalds, Starbucks and other places to find a wifi connection but there wasn’t one. Eventually I gave up, put my luggage in a locker in the subway station and got something to eat in the haze of noise and bright lights of Tokyo. I then went back to get my luggage but I couldn’t find which one of the 30 subway exits I’d left it in, and I hadn’t a clue if I was in the correct station. Many Tokyo stations give onto a regional train station and the express train station, and also on to a three floor shopping mall so even finding an exit is impossible. Eventually I found it but by this time I had missed my train and was completely alone and without a wifi connection, in Tokyo. As I couldn’t book a hotel, I wandered the busy streets looking for a hotel in this upmarket district, I asked the police what I could do but a night in any of the hotels in the area would have cost me at least a £100.
By the time it got to 9pm and had wandered the streets for an hour or two with no luck finding a hostel I decided I would turn a negative into a positive, spend the night doing as many exciting things as possible and have an exciting story to tell my grandchildren one day. I passed by casinos, seedy places, shopping malls, I saw the English language school AEON lit up in lights (it was too high up in a building, too flamboyant and I could never imagine working for them), I went to a British pub expecting to see tourists but surprisingly inside it was full of Japanese people drinking ale and eating fish and chips, then I ordered half a Guinness, and for the last time during the day I got out my laptop and began searching for an internet connection, but again no such luck. I began thinking to myself – this is perhaps not a story that my grandchildren would like to hear.
I left the pub, places were starting to close and it began to rain heavily L and decided I would have one last try at finding a place to stay that night. I used my JR pass, jumped on a local train and decided to get off at a random stop and I began a search for hotels again. This time it worked I stumbled upon a street full of hotels, all very nice and allnat around £25 - £50 a night. The first two sent me away because I didn’t speak Japanese but the third accepted me and I finally got to bed at 11pm.
At about midnight I woke up and I started to be really sick. I continued to wake up and be sick every half hour or so until about 8am the next day
Advertisement
Tot: 0.051s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 8; qc: 24; dbt: 0.0316s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1mb