Post #7 - October 18, 2012 - Kawaguchi-Ko (Mt. Fuji), Japan

Jeff here.

Our apologies for the lack of post yesterday. We took the overnight bus to Kyoto so didn't have the chance to write a post. I'm sure you were all devastated.

Yesterday was a pretty uneventful day. We slept in until around 8:30 am in Kawaguchi-Ko (near Mount Fuji), grabbed a bite to eat, and then headed for the bus depot for our trip back to Tokyo. We didn't head straight to Kyoto from Kawaguchi-Ko because we bought bus passes with a specific company that does not service that area. So we were back on the bus for 1.5 hours bound for Tokyo. It was pouring almost the entire trip. Unfortunately, the rain didn't let up all day.

We pulled into the Shinjuku bus terminal around 1:00pm intent on figuring out where our bus bound for Kyoto would depart from. We had planned on accessing the internet through a nearby Starbucks to determine the location, but unfortunately I hadn't set up the internet access properly so we were out of luck without a good plan B. We ended up asking an employee of another bus company and he was kind enough to point us in the right direction. We were very quickly confused by his vague instructions and started to stress out as the rain was soaking into all our gear. We entered into a random building and some very helpful people printed out a map for us indicating where the building was in relation to our present location. Amazingly, this still wasn't good enough. So we wandered around in the pouring rain, consulting the map and humming and hawing about the direction we should walk in, until we asked a receptionist at a nearby building who indicated our destination was the building right next to where we were. Long story short, this was not a pleasant experience or a good start to our day in Tokyo. At the very least, we were able to store our backpacks for six hours for 600 yen (about $7.50).

After this we sat down in a nearby Starbucks (I know, we're pretty lame, but they're very comfy!) to eat the lunch we'd made for ourselves that morning. Here we decided to check out the Champs Elysees of Tokyo, known as Harajuku. Thankfully, the train ride was short, cheap, and easy -- a first for our travels in the Tokyo subway! Figures we'd get a hang of it on our last day there....

As far as I can tell, Harajuku IS Champs Elysees, except without the Arc de Triomphe: overpriced stores lining a pretty nice-looking street. The girl to guy ratio was hilarious. Probably nearing 20:1. Patty noted more than once how interesting fashion is here in Japan. I try to avoid thinking about things like that, but I'd have to agree with her. People definitely dress uniquely here. Patty exclaimed at one point: "That girl is wearing three different kinds of prints! And it kinda works!"

Anyway, we wondered around the streets for a while, walked through a very nice mall that was longer vertically than horizontally, which was cool, and then sought out a place to eat that is recommended by our book. Well, perhaps we've mentioned this before that our book's maps leave something to be desired. We wandered somewhat aimlessly for more than half an hour before we finally found the place, which, in my opinion, had been entirely incorrectly described in our book: I'm sorry, but a "glowing red sign" is not the same as a red sign with a light shining on it! Look, when things are all in Japanese symbols, these things REALLY matter!! We had walked by the restaurant we were looking for three or four times before, and as a last ditch attempt, we compared the symbols on the sign to the symbols in our book. We got quite a laugh out of that!

The restaurant was awesome though. It was a dumpling kind of place, with dishes served more as appetizers than meals, and we ended up ordering six different dishes. All were quite yummy and different from other meals we have had so far in Japan.

After this, we headed back to the subway and trained it back toward our bus depot. Naturally, we exited from the subway on the wrong side of the tracks, so it took us some time to figure out how to actually get over to the other side. But we made it and eventually made our way back to our bus depot with a couple minutes left on our locker. We then had the pleasure of waiting 3.5 hours in the bus depot for our bus to leave. You might be wondering why we didn't just lock our stuff away for another couple hours and explore some more, but we were so tired by this point that that was simply out of the question.

Those hours slipped by pretty slowly. Patty was just exhausted, but falling asleep on those chairs was not an option. When we finally boarded our bus at 11:20 pm, we found the seats to be quite comfy and it didn't take too long for both of us to fall asleep. Unfortunately, it was pretty hot on the bus, which made sleeping a little uncomfortable, but despite that I felt pretty well rested when we reached Kyoto at 8:00 am the next morning.

I can't believe I've written so much about such a boring day! Sorry about that. Hopefully Patty's post about today's events will make up for it!