Japan, Day 6: Travel to Tokyo

Well, after much traveling today, I actually made it here to Tokyo without getting lost! I'm quite proud of myself. My train left Kyoto at 5:30 am, so the plan was to wake up at 4:30 am...right, that did not happen! I slept through my alarm but miraculously awoke at 4:50 am. I hopped in the shower, quickly packed, and literally ran a mile to the station to reach my train just as it was about to leave. I bounced from train to train, a total of 6 transfers in all, before finally reaching Tokyo 10 hours later! It was rough, but train travel is so much better than airplane travel. Plus, I got to see Mt. Fuji, which is nearly an impossible feat considering it often likes to hide behind clouds.

Mt. Fuji from my seat in the train.

I arrived at my hotel around 3:00 pm and met Kelly in the common room. She was chatting it up with a British guy who is on his first leg of an around-the-world trip. We were all famished, so we decided to venture into the Ginza district for a short bout of sightseeing and dinner. The Ginza district is a commercial area reminiscient of New York's Times Square, complete with massive neon billboards, television screens, designer shopping, and of course, people. We walked around for ages trying to find a cheap restaurant...we were quite unlucky. We finally decided to come back to our area in Asakusa .

One of the brightly-lit intersections in Ginza.

We found a restaurant with pictures in the windows and immediately went inside. We each ordered a meal, but all the waiter brought us were two tiny plates of food...we thought it was just a "while you wait" snack, but he never came back. Twenty minutes later, we realized this was all we were going to get, contemplating a "dine and dash" before paying for the meal and leaving. We then walked straight to the closest convenience store, picked out some Japanese delicacies, then came back to the hotel to eat our real dinner.

Gotta take a picture of the Dior Building!

On another note, the tsunami tragedy in Southeast Asia has really affected me emotionally. If I hadn't been so adament about coming to Japan for the winter holiday, there is no doubt in my mind I would have traveled to Thailand or Indonesia. I was actually looking into flights into Bangkok or Phuket, Thailand just before booking my flight to Kyoto. Everyone was telling me to go south since Japan's winters can be quite brutal, in addition to the massive amounts of money that would be spent here. I would gladly blow a million dollars and be naked in a snowstorm before losing my life, which would have been an inevitable outcome of being in Thailand. I've heard that as many as 2,000 foreigners have died in Thailand alone, and I'm sure upon returning to Korea that many of those foreigners were English teachers like myself.

I don't know what our plans are for tomorrow, but I'm sure we'll do some sightseeing around the downtown Tokyo area. We will probably do as the Japanese do and visit a temple tomorrow night to ring in the new year.