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3 Midwesterners to Tokyo

In my previous posts, I had talked about all the planning and financing I had gone through before I went to Japan. In this post, I will be covering how my trip to Japan went, specifically the first day.

While I am talking about this trip I want you to keep this in mind: We were 3 white guys from the Midwest, one who had never flown before, none of us have ever been on an international trip and the biggest city we had ever been to was Chicago but that was only for a day. Oh and I forgot to mention none of us have ever used a subway or train before.

Yeah, it was one hell of an adventure and the 3 of us desperately want to go back again because this was such an incredible, fun time that we wouldn't trade for anything.

The Flight to Tokyo, Japan

We left from Chicago O'Hare at 6 am on the 29th of March. There was such a disconnect for our first international flight and it began soon as we tried finding the Air Canada terminal but eventually, we found it, went through security with a security guard droning the same instructions over and over again in a very annoying tone.

There was some sort of school that had booked most of the plane to Vancouver, though I wasn't too happy with one of the teachers. The idiot delayed the plane because he had been sucking down a gigantic cup of coffee while waiting for the plane and the coffee decided to come out 10 seconds before we were supposed to take off. After a 10 minute delay for the coffee idiot, we were cleared for takeoff and away we went.

Vancouver International Airport was interesting, I especially liked the aquarium they had inside of it. I had a meal, did my daily toiletries before trying to take a nap since it had been 18 hours since I had slept. I failed and after what felt like an eternity the final leg of our flight began.

The next 12 hours and 45 minutes were not very pleasant for me, I am a big guy and after 6 hours the thin seat cushions, small seats and restricted legroom starting taking its toll. Towards the end of the flight, I was standing more than sitting, trying to shake the kinks out. All that went out the window once we landed at Narita. Finally, after 20+ years of dreaming, I had made it to Japan.

The Disaster of Narita

Entering Narita International Airport was a disaster. We landed at 1 pm and apparently Narita was swamped that day, half of the escalator walkways were shut down. Then we hit customs, which was a sea of people as far as the eye could see, the Narita's Free Wi-Fi couldn't handle the load and was going down every 20 seconds and the ac units couldn't handle the amount of people so it was like a sauna.

It took close to 3 hours just to pass through customs, then finding our checked luggage was a pain due to them being so swamped they put it on the floor in a corner with a small sign with the flight number.

We then ran into the next problem, with Narita's Free Wi-Fi being down I had no way to use Google or Apple Maps so I went to my backup, 2 of us had installed Project Fi Data sims into our phones but for some reason it wasn't connecting even though in Vancouver it connected without a problem. My 3rd backup was Maps.me(downloaded to my phone) but I hadn't realized that Narita wasn't part of the Tokyo district data I had downloaded so it kept prompting me to download it. So the 3rd backup was a failure.

I had memorized what to do when landing in Japan but by this time I hadn't slept in over 30 hours, was tired, sweaty and feeling extremely dirty so I was having difficulty remembering but I had one final hail mary. My Airbnb host had sent me a pdf I had downloaded from Line and it should have detailed instructions on how to get to the Airbnb from Narita. It did and finally, we had a way out of Narita Airport and into our Airbnb.

3 Americans lost in Tokyo

Remember what I said to keep in mind when reading this post? Tokyo would give us one last surprise before we would make it to our Airbnb. That surprise directly comes from our inexperience with the subway system and with how the Japanese use signage. We had 2 transfers to make before the train station for our Airbnb would be reached and the first transfer was the most complicated.

Due to our inexperience during this transfer, we didn't realize that the Japanese subway systems will only show the subway line symbol(color) and the directions to go when you are still far away from the line you are looking for. They expect you to continue heading in the direction you were pointed to until you start getting close to your destination and only then will they start showing the lines symbol with more detailed directions.

So being unaware of this and not quite realizing just how big these subway stations were, we went the completely wrong direction and ended up on the wrong side of the Shinjuku subway station at night. What do you think could happen to 3 foreigners lost in Tokyo at night?

Not much actually, finally realizing our mistake after 30 minutes of wandering around cursing(in our minds) we managed to get a nice person to show us where to go and how to get there. We managed to make the final transfer without a problem and got off at our local train station, using Maps.me and the Airbnb pdf we made it to our little Airbnb. Finally, after 34 hours I could sleep but I did have a worry that was starting to ferment in my mind, I hadn't gone to the bathroom in 28 hours... uh oh.


The 1st picture is a pano from my Airbnb deck and the second one is a picture of our first meal in Japan.
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Part 4 of How I traveled to Japan and accomplished one of my dreams will hopefully be posted tomorrow.