Japan Day 1: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

Every great adventure has a beginning, and this beginning involves hours and hours of planes, trains, and automobiles.  You pay the price to travel halfway across the globe!  We started with a 15 hour trip to Taipei.  On this leg of our travels, I learned that when you fly for that long on EVA airlines, they REALLY like to feed you.  The thing is, I always travel with food...you never know when you're going to get to eat next, and I don't want to be hangry!  Never having done this before, I didn't know about the oodles and oodles of food.  Somehow I had a real knack for eating a snack almost immediately before the food cart came calling.  For the most part, I declined the offerings, but the attendants were pretty insistent.  I absolutely ate more than I was actually hungry for.

So we did eventually arrive to Taipei, where we had a fairly short layover.  My dad had lounge privileges, (I did not know this was a thing--I might be addicted now!) where once again, they had food.  And it was free and representative of local fare.  So I had to eat some!  Then we boarded the plane, and this time it was only three hours.  With one meal.  Which I tried to decline, but ended up taking anyway.  I was pretty much rolled off the plane at this point.

Once at Narita Airport, we had to take a train to Tokyo.  That train station is INSANE!  It amazes me that anyone ends up where they are supposed to be when they are supposed to be there.  I really don't know how to explain the sheer confusion.  The signage tells you what train line/track number, but one line goes to several different cities so if you don't know the line, good luck!  By the time the trip ended, we had learned to head straight to information and ask what track number we were going to and what direction it was in.  But we didn't know that yet, so we missed a train and had to start over with getting tickets and figuring it all out.  Luckily, the trains are constantly coming, so missing it didn't put us behind too badly. 

Once we finished our train travels (there were a few connections to different lines along the way), we still had to take a taxi to our airbnb.  The driver claimed to know where he was going.  He didn't.  And honestly, we had a map to the place but didn't realize it in the mass of papers printed for our many different airbnbs.  So the taxi took longer, and cost MUCH more, than we had anticipated.  Towards the end of the drive, I noticed a woman getting out of her car.  I had the idea to stop and ask her, although of course my dad had to do it (and all other communication) as he is the one who knows the language, at least somewhat.  This ended up being the best idea that I take complete credit for, as not only did she know where it was, she walked my dad over there with the taxi following behind them. This was my first exposure to how incredible nice the Japanese are.  I'm not sure I've met a nicer people on the whole. Other than the taxi drivers.  But I'll be saving that little bit for another post.

Thanks to that sweet stranger, we made it to our place, which was a traditional Japanese house.  I loved it. Other than the fact that we couldn't figure out the AC.  More on that in the next post.  (How's that for a tease?  ;) ) It was definitely on the small side, but it was the perfect size for a single person like myself.  It was also the perfect size for me--I was greatly amused by how low all the doorways were!  So naturally I needed to take pictures.

The scenery when we first got in.  It was dusk and overcast and just beautiful.  I loved the brick streets set against the mountains.  It was the very definition of quaint, and if I could live there I would.  Straight out of a storybook!  The pictures really don't do it justice, sadly.

At any rate, that's the end of day 1.  After all that travel, I slept well that night!