After our long flight (albeit 1st class, thank you miles!) from Honolulu we arrived at the remote Narita airport in Tokyo. An Uber would have cost $200, so we needed to find an alternative route. All the books pointed to taking a bus (UGH), so we found the bus line and after some communication about our Air B&B location it was decided that we needed to take the train. We figured out how to get a ticket for the train (which was the subway) and the guy at the counter gestured to us that the train was leaving in 5 minutes so we should hurry. This is important because I am blaming what happened next on our rushing, not on our subway skills.
Toyko is like the UK, where you put your ticket in and you have to retrieve it on the other side (unlike NYC), which is what Eric did, I did not and Gage didn’t even put his in, rather he shoved it in the side where it was supposed to come out! This created a major pile-up at the “turnstile” and the subway attendant came to retrieve our tickets and they had vanished. He told us (in Japanese) that we needed to purchase new tickets. So, of course we missed our train and now had the aggravation of needing to go back and buy new tickets, you can imagine how happy Eric was with this situation, Gage was half asleep (after watching 4 movies) and I was just trying to stay positive. I got my yen out, prepared to buy more tickets and I think he felt bad for us and asked us for our names, which I wrote on a paper. He told me to put the money away and walked us all the way down to the train and ”explained” in Japanese that the next train wasn’t an express and we needed to switch trains. He said he would call the ticket person at our destination and and let them know that we didn’t have our tickets. We of course thought that was never going to pan out. An hour later we arrived at Oshiage Station, exited through 1 of the 3 exits and the guy at the end had our names and ushered us though the turnstile with no tickets.
We definitely felt the warm embrace of the Japanese culture, which has continued! We ❤️ 🇯🇵!
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