After the crazy party night, everything was difficult – including waking up. I finally dragged myself out of bed to go to Natsuno’s annual giant party at Yoyogi park. I was almost at the park when I got a message that this was our last opportunity to go get anything we had left behind at the temple we slept at before our cross-country Japan trip had started. I have to confess that I left around 2kgs of earrings, necklaces and rings because I realized that I would hate myself within a few days of backpacking.
We all have our addictions....
I took the train to the temple to get my stuff. Finally, I made it to Yoyogi park and it was lovely. Hundreds of Natsuno’s friends from everywhere round the world, eating, drinking and making merry. We were at the park till 8:30pm.
Mouna and I finally left to get to our Airbnb. We had been warned about train stations in Tokyo and how you can get lost in them for life, but we had not taken these warnings seriously. In the train station next to our home, we had very detailed instructions on how to get out and it took 15 minutes each time from getting off the train to actually getting out of the train station. Lazy and tired as we were, when we saw an elevator, we decided to take it up?
How difficult can it be to get to our exit from where the elevator takes us?
That’s how difficult.
We got out and decided to try googlemaps as nothing looked familiar. How huge is this train station? Are we even still in Tokyo? Googlemaps directions read as follows, “Go straight. Get into the elevator…followed by lots of other directions.”
We ignored this – surely we won’t have to get back into the train station to find our home? We can’t be that far. After walking around for half an hour and having no luck, we decided to go back into the elevator and follow the directions we had initially been trying to avoid…the one we took every time that took 15 minutes for us to get out of the train station.
You would not believe it….the elevator that had brought us out of the train station, would not take us back down to exactly where it had brought us from. In short, we would never find Exit 2 – the exit that would get us home.
Did we imagine that we had been in that elevator before? We got so desperate that we just took the elevator back to the street. By this time we were so hungry and frustrated. We got into a restaurant and had dinner as we brainstormed on how we were going to avoid homelessness that evening.
Finally, we came up with a plan, “Let’s take any train back to roppongi, take the train back..and just follow the directions that we always used before. None of this..I’m too lazy to walk 15 minutes out of the train station business and using magical elevators that take you nowhere.”
At that very moment, hours later – we finally saw a sign for Exit 2. Mouna and I almost kissed the ground.
Freedom at last!