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Published: January 30th 2007
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Once upon a time, right in the middle of an Aussie Summer, Linda (aka Helen) and Jodes (aka Monika) decided to pursue a professional snowboarding career in Japan.
As you do when you've only had 6 hours of experience on a snowboard.
(We didn't say it was a GOOD decision!)
Here is the story of our journey...
Our two week grand tour of Japan started off relatively smoothly - perhaps a little unusual for Linda and I! Despite the lady at check-in getting extremely agitated about us having only an E-ticket and no physical ticket with a particularly crucial number on it that she just had to have to make it through her day, we made it onto the flight. We were somewhat amused that noone else at any other airport throughout our trip seemed to care about this highly important and vital ticket number which seemed a matter of life and death to this lady. Her agitation about the number did however help her overlook our excess baggage which was a bit of a bonus so we figured it was worth her hypertensive crisis.
The 10 hour flight was actually pretty good. Not only did
we manage to score seats up in the bulkhead but, despite the flight being nearly full, we scored a whole row to ourselves which made a huge difference! Milko, our invisible friend, was very comfortable in his own seat!
The flight went pretty quickly - perhaps helped by the excessive number of inflight movies that we watched - and before we knew it we were off the plane, through customs, through immigration and on a train heading into the heart of Tokyo! It was a little overwhelming to have everything go so smoothly!
Narita airport is about 66km out of Tokyo city and naturally we had elected to spend our first night in Japan, oh nowhere near the airport! Subsequently we had to negotiate the city train system. Which again went all too smoothly... We'd pre-purchased a week's pass for the Japan Rail system so all we had to do was exchange our voucher for a JR pass and book a reserved seat on our train out of the airport. The train arrived on time, left on time, was clean, had loads of leg room and even had a little hostess lady selling chicken cutlet sandwiches and unidentifiable snack
foods. Truly pleasurable!
It took us an hour to get into Tokyo and then we had to change trains and head out to the western suburb of Shinjuku where our hotel was waiting for us. Shinjuku is one of Tokyo's busier suburbs with loads of department stores, flashing neon, video screens, shopping arcades... We were a little nervous because Shinjuku station is also apparently one of the world's busiest train station with 2 million people heading through there every day. And we were heading right for it in peak time!!! We both had visions of this big mass of people with neon lights and tunnels and gates all over the place and us being swallowed whole into the crowds...
Well we weren't too far wrong but when it comes down to it Shinjuku station was not too unlike Sydney Central and we were the tallest people in the place so it was easy to find our exit! From there it was a 15 minute walk to Hotel Sunlite Shinjuku. It did take us a little longer to find our hotel than we expected, partly due to a complete lack of any of street names and partly due to the immense volumes of neon in Shinjuku which turned us into stunned mullets for a few minutes, completely unable to cope with any basic life functions. There were just giant video screens, flashing neon signs, gaming machines EVERYWHERE! Lord knows what the electricity bill for Tokyo sits at...
It was a great relief to check into our, somewhat miniscule, room at the Hotel Sunlite. Tiny but clean and comfortable. The toilet alone kept Linda amused for a good half hour working out what all the buttons did. We had a pretty basic toilet in our room but some of the ones we came across in our two weeks were very special with a huge array of buttons and levers to negotiate. I have to say I am a pretty big fan of the button that plays bird calls or flushing sounds as you sit and contemplate the day. And the automatic seat warmers never went astray!
After a quick snack from our local '7-Eleven' substitute we crashed out on our rock hard hotel beds. Both of us got woken a few times during the night by some earthquake tremors which sent our beds moving across the room. I think it shows just how tired we were that we both instantly went back to sleep after each of them, not really realising that neither of us were dreaming until the next morning. How like us to be completely non-phased by a (mini) natural disaster!
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