The Night Bus and Tokyo Day 1

So the night bus was crazy... It started with me realizing at 9:00 (mind you we were meeting up at 9:45) that somehow I lost the slip of paper with my bus ticket on it. So I rushed over to the Seminar house and Jennay ended up printing it out for me because I wasn't allowed to use the computer as a vistor. We got on the bus to Hirakata Station at 10:10pm, the literal last bus headed that way from the Seminar Houses.

I navigated us to Osaka, then to the station called "Shin-Osaka" You see our bus was leaving from "Osaka Station" and I assumed since the Shin-Osaka subway stop was the only one with 'Osaka' in it that it was the right one. Well after walking around the station we ended up asking someone in a kisok. Thankfully, they spoke English! They told us that Osaka was the next stop over by the JR line (Japanese Railway) so we hopped on and got over to Osaka station.

After asking two more people we were in the right line waiting for our bus. It doesn't sound like much, but all this took us about 2 hours to complete. But now we know, and will be pros at it. Japan has so many forms of Public Transport it's really hard to keep track.

When Jennay and I checked in we realized we were on different busses, upon closer inspection she'd booked to get off at Shinjuku, not Tokyo Station. Since she was supposed to get there before me and Tokyo Station was closer to the Hotel we decided to meet there.

I got a window seat on the bus, and actually slept, enough that I feel well rested. The only scenery I really saw was going into Tokyo when I was up, but it was nifty to see the skyline gradually raise. At Tokyo station I struggled with my Japanese, but eventually got directions to Asakusa where our hostel is. I also met up with Jennay without a hitch.

So we made it to Asakusa and then began to find our hotel. Here is a picture from a bridge:

We eventually found the hostel and dropped off our things we couldn't check in until 3:00 so we locked up our things in the free lockers and walked around for awhile exploring Asakusa.

In walking we found the Bandai corporation, a big liscencing headquarters.

We also ran into a bunch of small shrines around the place.

Jennay is sleeping now, she was in the back of the bus and in the middle of a seat of 5 so she couldn't sleep. In an hour or so we're gonna go back out and tackle Tokyo!