Japan in June: Hydrangeas! Also Japan in June: rainy season. Today the weather ladies announced the official start of the rainy season just in time for my arrival. Big rain is coming this weekend. Neat! I can’t wait to see the daily interviews with people talking about the rainy season (and hydrangeas or rainboots). I think by the end of the trip I will be seriously upset I removed my garden rainboots from my luggage at the last minute.
Any flight longer than five hours borders on intolerably boring. The direct flight to Haneda was about 11 hours, and at least I got lucky in that we had nobody in the middle seat in our row. The guy on the end seemed to be a good sport when it came to me and my combo of tiny bladder and bottomless tea and water intake during the flight. The middle seat became my foot seat and I was able to be somewhat comfortable for most of the flight (amazing!).
During the 11 hours I also decided I would never fly again without my tiny pink sparkle slippers with me. My feet always freeze on planes for any kind of long-haul trip but this time, they were cozy and nice (and they sparkled).
For the entirety of the flight, I for some reason had the Space Jam song in my head (brain tumor? likely that), and therefore I was jazzed to take a picture of the first welcome to Japan sign I saw.
Haneda only has welcome to Tokyo signs! What country is this even?! I didn’t get to make my Space Jam joke and satisfy whatever part of my brain got that stuck in my head in the first place. Space Jam song, you will be my curse to bear the rest of the trip. Probably.
My Air B&B is in Yotsuya, very near where I went to college here. Unfortunately for my directionally challenged self, the ABB was in a direction completely unfamiliar from school (possibly near the bar where we Got Very Drunk one night and missed the last train. Long walks ensued and how would I even remember this place with all the shochu we had?).
Surely I would be able to make it to the ABB without an umbrella. It’s only seven minutes walking (if you are adept which I definitely am not). Alas, I forgot the power of Japanese rain, which is a very serious kind of rain in the rainy season. It started down pouring two seconds out of the station and I ran into a family mart to pick up what is probably the hundredth shitty conbini umbrella of my life. After minimal bumbling and hulking my relatively light luggage up three flights of stairs, I arrived!
This ABB is very cozy – but anything in the middle of Tokyo will be. Because we are in Japan, it came with a deadly low lantern which I have bashed my head into several times already. The entire apartment is perhaps the same size as my bedroom at home!
Harajuku’s Takeshita street called me through my jet lag and resistance to sleep, brightly lit and filled with umbrellas in the pouring rain. My true destination: cute socks and crepes.
After my traditional purchase of adorable socks, I headed to Angels Heart as is the way of my crepe-eating people. Sweet, delicious angels heart – you are the best crepes in the land. The last time I was here, I had some kind of strange upset stomach and wasn’t even hungry. Not today!
After stuffing my face with what was probably my twentieth meal in the last zillion hours I have been awake (what is sleep??), I took my zombie self over to nearby Meiji shrine. It was a ghost town – almost no tourists in the rain. The walk through the tunnel of tall trees felt like to took forever, and the sound of the pouring rain on the nearby forest was relaxing. If it was not wet everywhere maybe this would be a nice place for a nap.
And when we reach the “even this wet puddle would be nice for a nap” level of tiredness, we head back to the apartment to go to bed. On the train back, I saw a note from Mizuho bank stating their ATMs are closed this weekend. Closed ATMs are never a thing I have encountered here, but I have heard rumors of it. Why do the ATMs need to close? Will the robots remember how kind Japan was to them when it is time for the uprising? Is Japan just very careful not to karoshi its ATMs? It will forever be a mystery to me (or maybe not, if I could read more kanji).
The rest of this trip will be planned around the least rainy of the rainy season days, with a trip to Nikko and Fuji Five Lakes on the two sunny-ish days I have in my time here. I haven’t done some of the day trips despite living in Tokyo for a year – Hakone is also on my list! Anything beyond that is planned poorly at best as this was a last-minute trip!