Our flight to Narita Airport, Tokyo was scheduled at 5 Mar, 6am. Commuting to Changi Airport at 3AM in the morning would probably be a huge pain in the ass, as such, we (Lee Hoe, Si Rui and I) decided meet up at Changi Airport Terminal 1 at night to wait for the flight. Upon meeting up at around 12.30AM, we had a slight re-organisation of our luggage to maximize efficiency, which, honestly, did not achieve anything much. Next on our agenda, is to find a place to pass time until 4AM. We had hoped to find a place with power sockets available for public use. Unfortunately, probably after years of wanton abuse of free electricity, Changi Airport sealed them all up.
And our last member, the most beautiful girl in our group (since she was the only one), Hui Jun, came when it was close to 4AM. Our (urmm.....upperstudy???) Hui Xian wanted to come sent us off as well but was too drunk and sleepy to arrive on time. Too bad.
Reflections of the Delta Airlines:
Food was surprisingly good.
In-flight entertainment was a plus ( if it was 6PM instead. I don't give a damn about it, I just wanted to freaking sleep my trip there )
Leg room was quite spacious ( not that I know what the other airlines was suppose to be like, but still, good enough )
Good toilets ( had to use it quite a bit, to the annoyance of Si Rui and Hui Jun, after the 2 cups of strawberry yogurt provided (Refer to Point 1) decided to disagree with me. Lesson learnt, when in Window Seat, avoid things that will force you to the toilet, especially when you are lactose intolerant )
Arrived without a hitch. In fact, we were 1 hour early. Temperature then was at 5 degree Celsius. Freaking cold.
One good point about traveling in Japan is that most of the signage have English translation. We manage to find the Japan Railways (JR) Service Center easily and changed for our JR Railpass. Expected it to be more crowded though, since it was probably somewhere most tourist would first go to, but fortunately, it was pretty empty and we did not have to wait long until it was our turn. It was lucky that the lady at the counter could understand and speak English fairly well, and helped arrange and taught us how to get to Asakusa, where we will be lodging.
JR Railpass RECEIVED!
Tokyo JR Line Map RECEIVED!
Tokyo Subway Map RECEIVED!
The train had some pretty cool screens that showed you various information that is of not much use.
Setting off to our destination: Asakusa.
It was a long (about 45mins) but scenic trip.
But some slept through it
This is the Tokyo Train station where we arrived at. As per instructed, changed to the Yamamoto Line (aka Green Line, even the train is green) to go to Ueno Train station, which also happened to be just 1 stop from Akihabara, the otakus' holyland, but that's for some other day....
At Ueno, we booked the seats for the Shinkansen trip for the next day to Hakata, Fukuoka.
Fun fact: Not all service personnel speak English.
With what little English he can muster, and Japanese us, the exchange probably went something like this.
(DISCLAIMER: event may not be entirely accurate due to imperfection of the human memory)
Us (probably with distinctively non-Japanese accent?) : Ah shit ta, Hakata ikimas (shows Railpass)
Man at Counter (instinctively knowing we were tourist, did not attempt to converse in Japanese, which kinds of show his experience) : (looking through some book-like thing that's almost like the Telephone book for Trains) Nan Ji? Time?
Us: Ju Ichi Ji
Man: Gozen Ju Ichi Ji.........Eleven A.M ?
Us: Hai!
Man: ( look through book some more )
Man: ( takes out 2 ticket, pointing ) Two. Two. Tokyo......Shin-Osaka. ( points at time on ticket ) (awkward silence follows) Shin-Osaka.......Hakata. ( points at time on ticket ) (awkward silence follows)
Us: Hai! Arigatou Gozaimas. (walks away)
Man: (sigh with relief)
And from Ueno, we changed to the Tokyo Subway, which isn't covered by the Railpass, so we had to pay for ourselves, 160yen per person. Damn, why Asakusa no JR lines?
There was some minor cock ups here and there.
Firstly, got lost trying to find the line we needed to talk, Ginza line. Hui Jun still wanted to go to Shinjuku by herself even when we still don't know how to get Asakusa. Annoying. Problem solved when we realised that we need to exit from the JR train station gantry point before we can proceed on to the one for the subway. The station just seemed too big with many shops setting up business within the gantry, not just outside of it like in Singapore. The Fare Adjustment machines also kind of confused us and made us think that we could buy Subway Tickets from there.
Secondly, Si Rui tried to buy a 160yen subway ticket with a 10000yen note at the automatic ticketing machine, which ended up not having enough cash for change. Some train station staff have to personally come and hand us 9 one thousand yen notes. Lesson learnt: Never break your money on automatic machines, just do it at some convenience shop.
Thirdly, when entering the subway, you insert a ticket into the gantry machine, it will return it back to you with with a hole punched through it, in a manner slightly similar to the old MRT system. Only when you exit the station, the machine swallow the ticket. However, someone's ticket was not returned and we had a hard time trying explain to the train staff. It took something short of a miracle before we were understood and they recovered the ticket. Times like this makes us wished we knew more Japanese
Fourth, there was no lift at the station, so we had to drag the bags up and down the stairs. Not uncommon, even for the rest of the trip, so we realised, Travelling Light in Japan is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
Finally, when we arrived at Asakusa, we don't really know how to get to the lodging. Donated 680yen (the coins from the ticket machine) for a the tsunami disaster (that I am pretty sure happened very long ago) before asking for directions. However, she only has a vague understanding of the area and we only got a vague sketch of a map. Damn, wasted money.
Despite all the trails and tribulation on the first day, we still manage to reach final destination, our guesthouse, Khaosan Tokyo Original.
Our room was on the third floor....of a building with ridiculously steep staircase.OMG, imagine having to drag the luggage to the room today, and then back down the next day. It was lucky that we shared luggage.
To put it in a bad light, it is a small place ( picture below taken from the furthermost corner of the room already), but in a good way, u can say it is cosy... (though Si Rui would absolutely avoid such a stay again)
....And toilet was very inviting
We had other pretty amazing views as well. Some pictures from the rooftop by Si Rui.
Without much ado, Hui Jun swiftly left us for Shinjuku, for her Live Bar Performance. Leaving the 3 poor guys to fend for themselves.
First thing on our agenda - Dinner ( We realised that we never had lunch )
And so, we began exploring the city.
A local small-scale shrine.
On the right, the tower is the Tokyo SkyTree, the tallest structure in Japan. And to its left, the yellow piece of turd on a black box is the Asahi building which doesn't seems to serve any purpose, except to 'decorate' Tokyo's landscape.
Near our guesthouse is situated beside the Sumida River. (Our room also happens to have river view as well. Yay. Sorry for being random) There are 2 bridges connecting across it, 1 red, 1 blue, which makes it seem like the ideal place for a competition. Lol.
Relieved our childhood on a swing along the way. Nostalgia overcame me as we played like in the old times, allowing me to stop worrying about whether the swing can actually support our weight.
And the Tokyo SkyTree lights up at night, damn nice. Maybe we should visit it when we come back from Hakone....
And there was also a weird statue of a woman that seemed to be either washing something or trying to create a new kind of sexy pose.
Wandering around in the cold weather that we are not used to was not a good idea, and we also don't really have any idea where or what we want to eat, so we settled for some random soba store.
Unfortunately, they did not have any English Menu, thus we had our first, and probably not the last, experience of ordering blindly. ( Luckily, there is some hiragana and recognizable kanji, so it was almost but not completely clueless)
I remembered taking photos of the food we ate (I still remembered talking about everyone of us becoming Instagram freaks as simutaneously had the idea to take pictures of the first meal) , but for some reason, the photos seemed to be spirited away. Creepy. I hope I remembered wrongly. Anyway, Si Rui had Oyakudon, I had random soba whose name look nice and I forgot what Lee Hoe had, but I think was the cheapest soba option available. The lady of the store was nice enough to
Made 2 discoveries: Japanese have good soba....
....and great car-parking solutions. Their sense of multi-storey carparks seems to greatly differ from ours.
Patterns of the barricade of the red bridge
Another weird statue.....
The main focus of this picture is actually he Assassination Classroom Poster above. I did not see much anime-ish thingy in Asakusa.
The name for a Japanese Neighborhood Police Post is a ' Koban ' . Here's one, complete with a policemen and wanted posters on the notice board outside.
When I went back to Khaosan, it was close to 8pm. So I went up to the roof to take some pictures.
( which just says it will close at 8pm, if I end up getting trapped, my backup plan is just to knock on our room window and ask Lee Hoe, knowing that he is such a nice person, to help unlock the door and get me back into the building. Certainly do not want to be trapped outside in cold weather )
Tried out many ways to take a photo, with flash, without flash, with different level of ISO sensitivity.
and a CCTV whose purpose I could not fathom.
And this was what the other 2 guys were doing while we were waiting for the return of our petite princess ' O-Hime-Sama, doko desu ka? haiyaku kaerimasu. ' Since I brought my laptop over, we started to make good use of it and shared funny video on youtube with each other.
And then it struck me, we just left a girl to explore unfamiliar territory alone. Who knows what kind of bad things might befall on her? Even though it is very safe in Japan, even though she 21 years old already, even though we actually couldn't really do much if anything was to happened, it still left a very very very bitter aftertaste. (WTF, why am I so damn slow?) All we could do is hope she comes back safely, since anything otherwise would just leave us paralyzed clueless. We are, but, foreigners in a foreign land unable to speak in the foreign language. And it is already 30mins past the meeting time of 10pm agreed beforehand, but still not sign of her....
Luckily, she eventually came back ( I forgot when though ) and told us her adventure in Kabukichou, a famous red light district. It was a tale about a black guy who helped her out when she was lost and many golden hair men standing around and looking awkwardly at her. After that, we went out to spent our free complimentary ticket of a free drink at the Toyko Khaosan Bar, given to us for choosing to stay at the Khaosan franchise. 2 sake and 2 ume (plum) wine later, we went back to the guesthouse. There's not much nightlife after 9pm anyway.
Lee Hoe, Hui Jun and I showered before we sleep. And I discovered our teeth-brushing habits that held truth for the rest of the trip, I only brush at night, Lee Hoe in the morning, Si Rui urmm......, and Hui Jun is a girl, so she's different and I don't really want to know.
One last photo before sleeping....
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