Japan - Tokyo - part 1

Well we arrived in Tokyo Narita airport at about 8pm. We changed our watches again and trumped off to collect our bigger than ever sacks from the baggage hallway. I had to stop and take a picture of the ‘Welcome to Japan’ sign. Then just after we both got through immigration, the dude behind the desk popped back up and asked James would he mind answering a few questions he he I started to make the ‘rubber glove’ motion and noise whilst I tittered away, but then I decided to hang with him to make sure he didn’t enjoy it too much.

Turns out the immigration dude wanted our opinion (guffaw) on the immigration policy in Ireland. Apparently the Irish Minister had been on the news spouting about immigrants, and immigration dude (no superpowers that we know of but does a great job of stapling stuff) wanted to know what we thought of it. Now as you can imagine, we were delighted to get into a chat about immigrants in Ireland and the Irish opinion of them with Immigration Dude as we try to get into his country… .lol.

We diplomatically explained in pigeon engrish, that the wave of immigrants into Ireland has happened quite fast and that it has taken Irish people, (most of whom had never seen a black person in real life in their lives) quite a while to get used to it. We also told him about our Polish population – we didn’t tell him that every second Irish bloke under thirty in Dublin now has a Polish girlfriend.
He seemed quite satisfied; we wiped the sweat from our brows and continued on down the hall, only to see some dude carting away our luggage. Arrrgh we half shouted and pointed, and he handed it over. (He worked there it wasn’t just some vagabond)

On we went. We wrestled with the Japanese ticket machine for tickets to our train from the airport. Immigration Dude appeared in his norm clothes and asked us where we wanted to go, but of course we pronounced it wrong and he was puzzled. Then we finally saw it on the map and we got some tickets. But alas, as soon as the first super-dee-duper train came along, we hopped on it. It was the wrong one. As the conductor came around, I wondered if we would get clapped up for this, but we just had to pay again and we all bowed at each other and everything was swell.

It took us about 3 and a half hours to get to our hostel in an oldish quietish part of Tokyo, called Asakusa. A very nice Iranian girl stumbled upon us on the road and took us all the way to our hostel (as we could not make head nor tail of where we were)! Only for her, we would have been hiking off in the opposite direction and I was not in the greatest of moods. My pack has become so heavy with unuseful stuff! I am looking forward to donating some stuff to Paul.

So we dumped our stuff in the tinchiest of ‘twin rooms’ – just space for a set of bunk beds and that was it. The room also had gaps between all the rooms, so you could hear what everyone was saying in the rooms next to us. Tee hee hee

We wandered back out into the Tokyo night and wandered into this shokudo. – a small Japanese restaurant easily identified by the plastic menus with pictures outside. We pointed at some noodley looking dishes and within a couple of minutes, we were having some noodles & beer at about 2am. I said it was James’ birthday breakfast.