Tokyo and Kyoto

After Chris left, I had just a few days left on my Thai visa. The decision, to the question, "where to go next?", took me a while to answer. 

Two days before my visa ran out, I decided to take a plane to Tokyo.  For those who don’t know me well; I had been a big fan of Japan for years. Its culture, language, people and mega cities fascinated me since I was a teenager.

I cleaned out my place, packed my bags and of course had to leave a lot of stuff behind as it accumulated over time.

Anyway I did take a plane to Shanghai connected there, headed for Narita. 

I never experienced before, what I felt when I arrived in Japan. I was at first really excited but driving into Tokyo with the bus, looking out the window, I actually felt an adrenaline rush. Finally being in a place that I have wanted to visit for years and years. 

Tokyo is just amazing, so unbelievably huge, modern, different i any way and squeaky clean, almost sterile. There were no graffiti, no posters and no trash on the streets at all. The last point amazed me especially as they were lacking public trash cans as well.

 

In the next days, I experienced the difficulty of their metro system. It is not a big deal to find the right station and to figure out how much you’re supposed to pay, but if you have to change between different lines it can get tricky. 

There are several big companies running different lines of the metro, so if you try to change to a line of another company, you will have to pay again. So the cheaper price sometimes only applies if you take a longer, more complicated route.

This was quite confusing and hard to understand as a visitor. (Edit: Back then, there was also no smartphone app to help you with that. Now you can use: tokyosubway, tabimori or citymapper to name a few examples). 

Another thing that stunned me where the generally high prices for public transport that start at around $2 per trip.

Of course, as you might know, Japan is one of the richest countries in the word, right up there with my home-country, Switzerland,  which means it can also be quite pricey.



A lot of things are cheaper than in Switzerland, but some are much more expensive. Here a short overview of the price difference:

Object	Switzerland ($)	Japan ($)
Train ride from north to south	100	600
Meal (Restaurant)	15-150	5-80
Meal (McD or BK)	10-30	5-10
Book	20 - 100	10-50
Sandwich	5-15	3-4
Hostel (one night)	20-40	30-100
Cocktail (with nearly no alcohol)	15-18	14-18
Beer (in bar or club)	8	5

So be prepared to spend some money on your trip!

After two days in Tokyo, exploring Akihabara (the centre for electronics and anime/manga in the city), I moved to my friend Riku’s place in Hachioji.

His place is actually just 30 minutes from the city centre, but still very much at the centre of Tokyo. 

If you recall, Riku and me met in Hanoi and he offered me there to stay with him, while I was in town. 

He introduced me to some of his friends, we went to bars, restaurants and a hot spring together and he told me places to go for when he was at work. I visited the emperor’s palace, Roppongi & Shibuja disticts, some temples and gardens before I left for Kyoto. 

I had a nice Bus-ride in a high-tech Japanese bus, which had a SEGA console and TV screen in every seat to play games, watch movies or even TV during the ride. 

Kyoto was equally amazing as Tokyo, but in a completely different way. Kyoto being the old capital of Japan, and a much smaller city, it is loaded with beautiful temples, Zen-gardens, monasteries and amazing food places. Going to Japan, you simply can't miss this city.

I decided to leave Japan early, as I spent way more money than budgeted and even I loved the place, it was simply not sustainable for a long period of time.

I ran into some issues leaving the country as the airline required me to show a ticket out of Thailand to be allowed to fly. It was quite a hassle to try and argue with them, that as a backpacker, I would use land transport to leave the country which was much cheaper to book in-country. 

At last, I was allowed to sign a liability waiver so the airline wasn't liable if I overstayed my visa in Thailand, and they let me board.

I also had to pay additional $100 for my luggage because it was 8kg over the allowance, which was strange because I had the same weight on the way to Japan, with the same airline. So all in all this was a pretty frustrating end to my trip.

After getting back to Bangkok, I got a new apartment and started looking for jobs and informing myself about the possibilities to set up a business myself, as I decided to try and stay here for a while.