Shinkansen

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I went to the Tokyo Station (the main subway/rail station in the city) at around 7PM the third day in Japan.  I was a little late getting there, and was afraid I wouldn’t meet Kelly where we planned to meet because she’d get tired of waiting for me.  But everyone’s late all the time with SAS, and I was hoping she’d experienced that too and would just wait for me.  She called me, and I wanted to keep it under a minute, so I explained as best as I could that I was on the subway headed for Tokyo Station and I’d be there soon and look for her and hopefully be there in about ten minutes.  This was right at 7:00PM essentially.

 

So I got there, and I looked around for the Shinkansen, and there were signs pointing to it, so I just followed it.  I tried to go out through the Yaesu South exit toward the Shinkansen, where all the signs had pointed, but they stopped me and said I needed a ticket first.  It wasn’t really a subway exit, but a Shinkansen entrance.  So I looked around for Kelly first, and then we talked on the phone again, and I told her where I was and she said she would come find me.  Time passed, I walked, I looked, she looked, she walked, we didn’t find each other.  We called again, and the same thing happened.

 

I told her to go to Terminal 7 and she said she didn’t see signs for that anywhere.  Eventually we finally pieced together that I was in the part of the subway station that you could only access if you’d bought a subway ticket/exited from a subway train, and she hadn’t bought a ticket or shown up by subway.  So I had to exit the arena and hope to find her outside.  So I left, and told her to go to the entrance that I was standing near.  I ran into two dudes from America, one of whom I believe was teaching English there for a while, and they wished me luck.

 

Finally, at about 7:45, when I was turned around and walking in another direction to look, Kelly shouted my name, and I turned around.  I sighed heavily from relief and walked quickly toward her and gave her a hug.  It was nice to see her.  She was smiling.  She always smiles.  We said hello and I asked where she was, and then I hugged her again because it was a pretty exhausting and frustrating search and I was glad to just finally have my friend be there and know that we would make the train in time (the last one left about 45 minutes later).

 

So we went to the ticket station and got our tickets, which were fairly expensive.  The train left in about 20 minutes, which we figured would be enough time to find it.  It actually only took us like 3 minutes to find it, and we ended up just chilling on the train for that amount of time.  It sat at that station much longer than any other station, which was good for us.

 

There were vending machines on this train.

 

The ride was incredibly smooth and incredibly fast.  You never felt a thing, you just saw cities whizzing past you out the windows, and sometimes trains would come in the other direction and they’d come and go within two seconds.  It was pretty wild.

 

We stopped in Osaka and Kyoto.  Neither of us were actually going there, so we figured this was our chance to get a story about those cities when people ask us where we went.  We went to Kyoto.  I went with my friend Kelly.  It was really dark, but it looked pretty when we drove by.  I went to Osaka with Kelly too, but we got separated a little bit after we showed up.  Fortunately I found her again at the train station, and then we left for Kobe.

 

(I left my seat before the station and joined her again at the station.  That’s our story)

 

The train was scheduled to show up in Kobe at 22:58.  It pulled into the station at 22:57:38.

AMERICA.  GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER.