Going to Tokyo... In Theory

After Christmas Russell and I decided to go on vacation and finally spend some time in Tokyo. Tokyo is about three to four hours away from Kobe if you take the Shinkansen (bullet train) and more like 12 hours away if you take slow trains. The Shinkansen is expensive (about $120/person one way) so we didn't really want to spring for tickets just for a weekend trip. The slow trains, though, were too slow for a weekend trip. Instead, we have been devoting ourselves to exploring the more immediate region - which offers plenty to explore.

Finally, though we decided to head north to Tokyo. Among other things I wanted to do, a high priority was to visit my host family from Sapporo, who had moved to Tokyo at some point in the last four (five?) years since I stayed with them. We called ahead and they were free during our whole stay, so we agreed to make plans and set a day to meet with them.

Then came the hard part. Making plans. We had been discussing making plans for weeks, but had never actually sat down to do it. We knew it would be New Years and while we had heard that most people flood out of Tokyo during New Years (so the subway is more comfortable to use) we had also heard that hotels would be booked tight. I was a bit nervous about that and wanted to make sure we had a place to stay before we headed off. Russell, on the other hand, was not so concerned with finding a place to stay, but was very worried that there wouldn't be any Shinkansen tickets when we went to take the train. We went back and forth about where we should start planning and finally came to this conclusion:

We would assume that Tokyo was a big enough city that there was a bed in it somewhere for us - even if that was a couch at a 24 hour internet/comic book/cubicle shop. We packed light to make all scenarios less intimidating (light meaning we wore one change of cloths and each packed a spare outfit into one backpack). We packed gifts for my host family, the Nintendo DS and our electronic dictionary and set out. Oh, and in case anyone is wondering how we managed to email everyone, iphones rock.

Before we set out to *hopefully* buy train tickets, we split the wish bone Russell had been saving from the Christmas Party roast chicken. Since we both wished for ease of bed-finding in Tokyo, it didn't really matter who won.