Well, I’m weary. We’ve walked 27,000 steps today – that’s 18km, and climbed 31 flights of stairs, so I’m entitled to be.
But first, today’s Japanese question with no answer. Why is it that Japanese school girls wear sailor’s uniforms?
It was raining when we woke up this morning. First order of business was to sort all of our train tickets for the next few weeks. Having a JR Rail Pass saves you heaps as you wander about Japan, but you have to buy it before you arrive in the country. It would be far too easy to actually send you a pass that you can use, but this is not Eurail. No. This is Japan, so they send you a voucher for a pass that you have to exchange when you get here. And you aren’t the only people trying to do that. Every tourist to the country has to find a JR Rail office and stand in an hour long queue to exchange your voucher for a pass. Ours was several stations down the line at Ueno – a large interchange station.
Now you can just hop on a JR Rail train with your pass, but there are 138 million people in this country all trying to do the same thing, and you aren’t guaranteed a seat for the next few hours, so you also need to make a seat reservation. If this was Eurail you could just reserve it online and turn up, but, no, here you have to either stand in a different hour long queue to do a maximum of two reservations, or wrestle with a particular automated machine (the blue one) that’s lurking somewhere in the station.
After standing in a further line at the Information counter, they pointed us to the right machine, and we started to wrestle. You have to scan your two JR Rail passes, then type in your two passport numbers, then choose your starting and finishing stations, then the required departure day and time, the number of seats, choose where you want to sit, and finally your seat reservations pop out the slot. The machine says goodbye, and you start the whole process again for the next journey, after sharing certain types of looks with the other foreign tourists all waiting for a turn at the same machine.
We have 14 train trips, and many of them are return journeys, so we needed to repeat the process over 20 times. Originally we were only going to do the journeys for the first week, but we got on a roll, and the rain wasn’t easing up. By the time we got through the second week, there were only a few more to do, so we kept going. Needed an envelope to get all the tickets home without turning into paper mache, but after a good hour or so we did it.
A celebratory coffee and breakfast, then we took the train back to the apartment, trudged through the rain, and double checked our work.
Now the Japanese have got this rain thing sussed. Everybody just leaves their umbrellas outside their door, whether at your home or at a shop. You just pick up the closest umbrella, use it, and leave it in the rack at your destination for the next person to use. Brilliant. And most people have clear umbrellas so you can see who you are about to run into, Mind you, cyclists holding clear umbrellas over their head as they tootle along takes a bit of getting used to.
Lunch time with the rain easing off, we walked all the way back to Ueno station this time, and then by train to Shibuya for our afternoon explore, via an Indian restaurant for lunch. Nice meal, but very disconcerting. Just what language does an English speaking customer use to order from an Indian who presumably uses Japanese as his first language? Pointing language of course, though I never did get that drink.
Apart from Mt Fuji, the image of Japan that you are most likely to have is the famous street crossing in Shibuya, and most of the thousands crossing it are tourists who have companions filming them from the various windows overlooking the crossing. Starbucks is the first choice of window for many, but very little coffee seems to be consumed. So, we duly walked across the crossing then went to the Starbucks window to film others doing the same, all without ordering.
Walked around the crowded Shibuya shopping streets on a self guided walking tour seeing a number of statues and buildings, before ending up at Yoyogi Park, one of the largest parks in the city, and home to several sporting stadiums which hosted sports for their two Olympics.
A quick metro trip to Shinjuku where we met up with Chiyo and her husband for a bit of a reunion. Chiyo was an exchange student who studied in Melbourne some 25 years ago and has kept in touch over the years, even played with Brendan as a toddler, so there was a lot of reminiscing.
After a coffee and chat, we left them to start our evening walking tour of Shinjuko. Kind of the centre of nightlife in Japan, and where lots of Japanese go after work to get drunk and sing lots. Oh, and it also hosts one of the largest red light districts in the city and multitudes of love hotels. You can pick them by the curtains you have to drive through at the entrances to their carparks. Heard lots about it, and wandered down the various alleyways following the obligatory red guide flag.
There are various establishments to meet both guys and girls, and if you get to be one the establishment’s hottest commodities you get your picture and your monthly ranking projected on the large electronic billboards above your place of work. No pressure now.
Shinjuku has the reputation as the busiest train station in the world, with an estimation 3.5 million passengers using the station each day. Supposedly has around 300 station exits, and the most crowded train of the day is the last train of the night ferrying all the drunks back home to sleep it off.
About 30 people on the tour, and by the time it was all over, and we had walked back to the nearest metro station, and then back to the unit from our station, we were pretty beat.
The famous Shibuya crossing
More cat cafes
One of the drinking alleys
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