Adventures in Japan

Actually 05.06.2008

Let's flash back 13 days: I'm at Narita airport with my mom, after a very uncomfortable flight to Japan. The flight had consisted of me watching a number of movies that, under normal circumstances, I would feel much too guilty and girly to watch. There are certain benefits to riding on planes, and one is that the movie selection seems to always encompass those films that are not worth renting (or, for that matter, worth your friends finding out you actually find pleasure in watching them), but have always interested you in some way or a manner. Guilty pleasures, I guess you could call them, the Super Sweet Sixteen or MTV cribs of flim.

Anyways, we send a few bags off under 宅急便, I get in contact with Billy by calling up his roommate Brendan's cellphone, and we board our bus to Shibuya where we were planning on staying that night. We get into Shibuya around 6:30, we shower up, get some food from the Food Show (underneath Shibuya station), and I get ready to go meet up with Billy at 八公 at our designated waiting spot.

This first leg of our trip is truly boring to be writing out each event, so I will summarize it up as, first, Billy coming at 9, him realizing that he may or may not want to spend a week traveling with only one pair of boxers and no sandals, debating whether he should go back to Brendan's house, us actually deciding to go back, and returning to Shibuya at 1:00 before our planned 4 o'clock departure the next day. A great start!

Oh, and please, if you read this, tell your friends about it, since my brother regards this as likewise to masturbation if I write it solely for the remembrance of my own journeys and not for others to read. I don't quite understand the analogy, but I don't want the work I'm being put into this to be considered as an example of self -pleasuring myself, so, well... i don't really know what I'm trying to say.

Before anything is said or done, I must note to all reading this, and most importantly, to myself, that everything written in this blog is somewhat susceptible to the flaws in my short term memory, as I have just decided, 5 days after returning from my trip throughout Japan on the rail pass, to write this blog to be able to remember (I would have liked to use the word chronicle, but that sounds a bit too epic) the adventures I once had as an 18 year old in my native country.

The idea of the trip itself had arisen in a somewhat random manner. I had known for a while (from bits and pieces of broken, random conversation in Japanese about everything from math to what I had done that night) that my friend Billy, who lived a few floors above me in my first-year residence of Kings Court at University of Pennsylvania, was just as, if not more, into Japanese culture than myself. When I had found out later on, in mid-Spring, that he was going to be studying for a few months in Hakodate this summer at the same time I would be in Tokyo, I enthusiastically suggested that we travel together throughout Japan before his program. This suggestion was nothing serious, purely a symptom of my tendency to say such things to all I meet, with little real intent on doing anything at all, and banking on the fact that most others are just as indecisive as I am. My mom had suggested before that I travel throughout Japan to see some of my native country anyways, so i thought, although this is most definitely not going to happen, if this does end up happening, why not?

And so with this idea in the back of my head, I spent much of my spring, all the way to the last day of school, in a state of uncertainty on what I was really going to do this summer (the whole time insisting to my parents that I had everything in order and decided, and they shouldn't nag me so much about my plans). But I guess somewhere along the way, between the 3 weeks I had between the end of school and the moment I boarded my plane to Japan, uncertainty had transformed behind my back into certainty. It almost seems like I ended up with a voucher for a week JR pass in my hand before I had made any real commitment to the matter. Even when I was calling Billy a few days before our trip, meticulously setting up our seven-day schedule for everything from the basics all the way down to the specific trains we would get on, did it really occur to me that this trip was really going to be (sorry for the lack of a less cliche way of expressing my thoughts) reality.

I am now on a race against time to put everything to words the experiences I had before they become lost in all but pictures. I am almost a hundred percent sure that before I finish writing the seven entries about my seven days of travel in a manner that I find satisfactory, I will have given up. But for now, I figure I will have some confidence in myself and churn away some entries.