Day 22 in Japan: Back to Tokyo



And so we said farewell to Lake Kawaguchi and Fuji San, and spent four and a half hours in trains and train stations. It wouldn't have taken so long, but on one change-over we got disorientated and took a train back the way we'd come. We weren't completely stupid: we were on the right platform, but couldn't tell from the signs which way led back toward Kawaguchiko and which towards Shibuya in Tokyo; when we got on the train I asked a woman if it was the train for Shibuya. 'Shibuya!' she nodded emphatically, and went back to her book. Well, maybe there are two Shibuyas, and we were heading for the other one. Whatever, it took about half an hour for us to realise we were heading back the way we'd come.

Eventually we reached Tokyo. We had lined up an apartment for our last four days at very reasonable rates through homeexchange.com, which had been our introduction to house swapping on our trip to Europe a couple of years ago. The lack of a common language had limited what our swap/host and we could communicate by email, so we didn't know where the flat was. Just yesterday we'd finally managed to arrange a rendezvous. Again, communication had been difficult: I seem to be getting progressively deaf, and the combination of our host, Hiroshi's, accent and my inability to see his lips, made the conversation hard going -- he had to repeat a question three times before I understood he was asking my name, which of course I had told him at the beginning of the call, but he was having as much difficulty as I was. We hadn't managed anything more specific than Oeno Station -- a vast, multi-level, multi-platform affair. A phone call once we reached Oeno narrowed the meeting place down to a statue of a woman. Naturally we picked the wrong one:



But 20 minutes later, another call from a public phone put us right. We met up with the incredibly patient Hiroshi beside the famous statue of just one woman on the other side of the exit gates, and were soon on yet another train which took us to Aoto, just half an hour out of town to the north east, and then a cab ride and we were at the ninth floor of Riverside Mansions, a block of flats that was to be our home for the rest of our stay in Japan:



The flat was small and comfortable, a kilometre from the station, and a kilometre in the other direction from a huge shopping complex (that's it on the very left of the cluster of buildings in the photo taken from our balcony above). We used the rest of the daylight to walk to the shops and buy up on vegetables and other food for our first home-cooked meal for weeks. In the evening we did some serious study of the guidebooks, including one that had been left by earlier visitors to the flat. Only three more days and Tokyo is very very big!

Posted: Mon - October 6, 2008 at 09:03 PM           |

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