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19 hours of train rides and I'm back in Tokyo. Also, Gifu sucks, but it has a happy ending
It's really weird to be sitting here in my house in Akabane again. I only got like 2-3 hours of sleep total over my train riding so I should go crash for a bit soon, but let me see if I can recap:
I checked out of the hotel at 10am or so in Kochi, walked to the station (it took 10 minutes). Bought some omiyage for my school -- lame "I went to Kochi" cookies because I never know what to get, and I checked with the stationmaster about the trains and the Seto-Ohashi bridge fee, which he said I didn't have to worry about. Huh.
First train was the Dosan line from Kochi to Awa-Ikeda. It was a one-car train and took 2 and a half hours. This train runs like, 8 times per day. It also stopped for about 5-10 minutes at a time at various stations. The leg from Awa-Ikeda to Tadotsu was the same exact style of one-car train, and it went at about the same speed. It was pretty easy to figure out that maybe 60% of the people on the train were also doing Seishun 18, because we all transferred from the first train to the second. We lost about half of that crowd at Kotohira though -- you could tell which people planned their route through where. Some of the people we lost were these loud college boys sitting across from me though. Then Tadotsu to Sakaide, that was a whopping THREE-CAR train but only 15 minutes.
Two guys that stayed with the same train as me all the way from Kochi to Okayama, one was a really tall guy dressed in almost all black, and one guy was not so tall but wearing a polo shirt, and he looked almost like a dead ringer for Nemoto from Lotte. He kind of seemed to want to say something to me at a few points but I guess was too shy, and I had no clue how to start a conversation either. The taller guy, I ended up talking to him a little on the short run to Sakaide, just asking whether he was also Seishun 18 and if he'd bought a 510 ticket for the bridge, and he said it was fine and we didn't have to pay for it. You'd think that in 4 hours on a small train with the same people we might have talked more, but oh well.
The Marine Liner from Sakaide to Okayama, the only really notable thing is that during that leg of the trip, I'd been following Koshien and Chukyo finally WON though it went from like 10-4 to 10-9 in the 9th inning, pretty freaky. I was fine with either team winning to be honest. Chukyo had the "bringing the trophy back to Aichi" thing going for it as well as that Dobayashi kid that I liked, but Bunri had the battery that had been together since 4th grade, which was a great story.
So, Okayama. I took a later train, opting for the 16:44 instead of the 16:14, and I got lunch in the basement arcade area of the station. I knew there was kaitensushi there from when we were there 8 years ago, but the place was empty, so instead I went to an udon place and got a katsudon/udon teishoku combo for 800 yen which was an insane amount of food and quite good, too. Barely got up to the platform as the train was pulling in at 16:39 (it was starting at Okayama) and managed to get a seat, so that was good.
There were two options for the Okayama-Ogaki leg. One involved no downtime at all, just a transfer in Himeji and a transfer in Yasu. The other involved the Shin-kaisoku, transferring before Himeji and then not again until Maibara, but with about 10 minutes station time on either end. I opted for that so I could go use the bathroom, and transferred in Agaho. It was a super-busy train and if I'd known, I would have transferred at Aioi for the train start. It ran during rush hour and it also ran through Himeji, Kobe, Osaka, and Kyoto, so we kind of got people coming home from work at ALL parts of the line. I did get a seat though and sat the entire way, so I can't complain too much. I was on that train for almost 3 hours. There was a slight delay and rather than having 8 minutes downtime at Maibara, I had to run for the next train with everyone else.
I arrived at Ogaki around 9:30 and wanted to ride the Moonlight Nagara (the night train from Gifu to Tokyo) at 10:48pm. It was cancelled a few months ago and now it only runs during the Seishun 18 season. But there was this old guy at the ticket desk who was like "it's full, if you don't already have a seat you're screwed and can't ride it, go find another way home" and I'm like "you have to be KIDDING me". I looked at the ticket machine and it said there were seats available, so I came back and told him that, and he's like "from here? to tokyo? are you alone? fine, I can sell you a seat for 510 yen," and so I bought a seat reservation ticket. What a jerk. Seriously.
I had HOPED to stop for food in Ogaki since I'd have an hour and change before the train, BUT everything in Ogaki closes at 9pm or 10pm or earlier, and by the time I got out of the station after arguing with this jackass, the nearby mall had CLOSED. So there was simply NOTHING open in the Ogaki station area except a convenience store that was several blocks away. I decided to say screw it and would be fine with the snacks I already had.
Then I went to use the bathroom, and I was waiting for the western-style toilet (I'd already used Japanese-style ones several times today and really just didn't feel like it again), and.. this lady who was at the counter brushing her hair and whatnot for like 10 minutes says, "You know, I've been here a while and nobody's come out of that stall..." so I try to open it and sure enough, the stall is empty, it's just the DOOR has a red marker on it because apparently the lock/unlock slider has the color thingy broken. WTF. Geez, good thing I wasn't in a hurry to catch a train and could spend a while waiting, seriously.
Now here's the funny part. I was in a major "FUCK YOU, GIFU, I'M NEVER COMING BACK HERE AGAIN" mood at that point. So I find the car that I'm supposed to be riding on the Moonlight Nagara and sit down at that place on the track to wait for like 15 minutes.
A minute or two later, this guy sitting next to me starts talking to me. I forget what he said, maybe "where are you from?" or something like that, but he did say it in Japanese, and it turned out he also was doing the Seishun 18 thing, and had been in Kyushu that morning, and so we got to talking... he hates planes and loves trains, and said he's a freshman in college in Tokyo and did the Seishun 18 thing to visit his family back in Kagoshima. And so I started mentioning all the places I'd been, and we talked about Kyushu and stuff.
Well, the train shows up, and get this... we had the seat reservations right next to each other, 9-C and 9-D. Talk about a weird coincidence! So we sat together for the trip and spent about the first two hours talking. It was cool because we mostly talked about trains and travel and parts of Japan and looked through his train schedule and map book and talked about places we'd want to go to, and whether it's possible to get there by Seishun 18, and so on and so forth. He told me a little bit about his university, and I talked a little about teaching English in a JHS, and it was great because he said "I'm glad you speak Japanese, I really suck at English... I liked it in JHS, but in high school it was my least favorite class."
Also, he told me that he got his train seat reservation a week ago. I said I'd gotten mine an hour ago. He told me I was really freaking lucky since the weekend Nagaras are booked entirely up like, weeks in advance.
Eventually around 1am we both kind of fell asleep, off and on, for the next few hours, so I don't really remember much of the rest of the ride. Got to Tokyo station and said goodbye, since he was running off to the Chuo line and I'm on the Keihin-Tohoku. I got my train and got home to Akabane Station at 5:38am, almost exactly 19 hours after I'd left Kochi.
But, it was a nice ending to an otherwise lousy station escapade. Now if only next time I could end up sitting next to a nice talkative guy a little closer to my own age, you know?
Okay, time to crash for a bit now... to sum up, though, I would say that the last 11 days have been one of the best trips of my life. I'm already trying to figure out where my next Seishun 18 journey should be to, either over the winter or spring holidays, or just next summer again.
I checked out of the hotel at 10am or so in Kochi, walked to the station (it took 10 minutes). Bought some omiyage for my school -- lame "I went to Kochi" cookies because I never know what to get, and I checked with the stationmaster about the trains and the Seto-Ohashi bridge fee, which he said I didn't have to worry about. Huh.
First train was the Dosan line from Kochi to Awa-Ikeda. It was a one-car train and took 2 and a half hours. This train runs like, 8 times per day. It also stopped for about 5-10 minutes at a time at various stations. The leg from Awa-Ikeda to Tadotsu was the same exact style of one-car train, and it went at about the same speed. It was pretty easy to figure out that maybe 60% of the people on the train were also doing Seishun 18, because we all transferred from the first train to the second. We lost about half of that crowd at Kotohira though -- you could tell which people planned their route through where. Some of the people we lost were these loud college boys sitting across from me though. Then Tadotsu to Sakaide, that was a whopping THREE-CAR train but only 15 minutes.
Two guys that stayed with the same train as me all the way from Kochi to Okayama, one was a really tall guy dressed in almost all black, and one guy was not so tall but wearing a polo shirt, and he looked almost like a dead ringer for Nemoto from Lotte. He kind of seemed to want to say something to me at a few points but I guess was too shy, and I had no clue how to start a conversation either. The taller guy, I ended up talking to him a little on the short run to Sakaide, just asking whether he was also Seishun 18 and if he'd bought a 510 ticket for the bridge, and he said it was fine and we didn't have to pay for it. You'd think that in 4 hours on a small train with the same people we might have talked more, but oh well.
The Marine Liner from Sakaide to Okayama, the only really notable thing is that during that leg of the trip, I'd been following Koshien and Chukyo finally WON though it went from like 10-4 to 10-9 in the 9th inning, pretty freaky. I was fine with either team winning to be honest. Chukyo had the "bringing the trophy back to Aichi" thing going for it as well as that Dobayashi kid that I liked, but Bunri had the battery that had been together since 4th grade, which was a great story.
So, Okayama. I took a later train, opting for the 16:44 instead of the 16:14, and I got lunch in the basement arcade area of the station. I knew there was kaitensushi there from when we were there 8 years ago, but the place was empty, so instead I went to an udon place and got a katsudon/udon teishoku combo for 800 yen which was an insane amount of food and quite good, too. Barely got up to the platform as the train was pulling in at 16:39 (it was starting at Okayama) and managed to get a seat, so that was good.
There were two options for the Okayama-Ogaki leg. One involved no downtime at all, just a transfer in Himeji and a transfer in Yasu. The other involved the Shin-kaisoku, transferring before Himeji and then not again until Maibara, but with about 10 minutes station time on either end. I opted for that so I could go use the bathroom, and transferred in Agaho. It was a super-busy train and if I'd known, I would have transferred at Aioi for the train start. It ran during rush hour and it also ran through Himeji, Kobe, Osaka, and Kyoto, so we kind of got people coming home from work at ALL parts of the line. I did get a seat though and sat the entire way, so I can't complain too much. I was on that train for almost 3 hours. There was a slight delay and rather than having 8 minutes downtime at Maibara, I had to run for the next train with everyone else.
I arrived at Ogaki around 9:30 and wanted to ride the Moonlight Nagara (the night train from Gifu to Tokyo) at 10:48pm. It was cancelled a few months ago and now it only runs during the Seishun 18 season. But there was this old guy at the ticket desk who was like "it's full, if you don't already have a seat you're screwed and can't ride it, go find another way home" and I'm like "you have to be KIDDING me". I looked at the ticket machine and it said there were seats available, so I came back and told him that, and he's like "from here? to tokyo? are you alone? fine, I can sell you a seat for 510 yen," and so I bought a seat reservation ticket. What a jerk. Seriously.
I had HOPED to stop for food in Ogaki since I'd have an hour and change before the train, BUT everything in Ogaki closes at 9pm or 10pm or earlier, and by the time I got out of the station after arguing with this jackass, the nearby mall had CLOSED. So there was simply NOTHING open in the Ogaki station area except a convenience store that was several blocks away. I decided to say screw it and would be fine with the snacks I already had.
Then I went to use the bathroom, and I was waiting for the western-style toilet (I'd already used Japanese-style ones several times today and really just didn't feel like it again), and.. this lady who was at the counter brushing her hair and whatnot for like 10 minutes says, "You know, I've been here a while and nobody's come out of that stall..." so I try to open it and sure enough, the stall is empty, it's just the DOOR has a red marker on it because apparently the lock/unlock slider has the color thingy broken. WTF. Geez, good thing I wasn't in a hurry to catch a train and could spend a while waiting, seriously.
Now here's the funny part. I was in a major "FUCK YOU, GIFU, I'M NEVER COMING BACK HERE AGAIN" mood at that point. So I find the car that I'm supposed to be riding on the Moonlight Nagara and sit down at that place on the track to wait for like 15 minutes.
A minute or two later, this guy sitting next to me starts talking to me. I forget what he said, maybe "where are you from?" or something like that, but he did say it in Japanese, and it turned out he also was doing the Seishun 18 thing, and had been in Kyushu that morning, and so we got to talking... he hates planes and loves trains, and said he's a freshman in college in Tokyo and did the Seishun 18 thing to visit his family back in Kagoshima. And so I started mentioning all the places I'd been, and we talked about Kyushu and stuff.
Well, the train shows up, and get this... we had the seat reservations right next to each other, 9-C and 9-D. Talk about a weird coincidence! So we sat together for the trip and spent about the first two hours talking. It was cool because we mostly talked about trains and travel and parts of Japan and looked through his train schedule and map book and talked about places we'd want to go to, and whether it's possible to get there by Seishun 18, and so on and so forth. He told me a little bit about his university, and I talked a little about teaching English in a JHS, and it was great because he said "I'm glad you speak Japanese, I really suck at English... I liked it in JHS, but in high school it was my least favorite class."
Also, he told me that he got his train seat reservation a week ago. I said I'd gotten mine an hour ago. He told me I was really freaking lucky since the weekend Nagaras are booked entirely up like, weeks in advance.
Eventually around 1am we both kind of fell asleep, off and on, for the next few hours, so I don't really remember much of the rest of the ride. Got to Tokyo station and said goodbye, since he was running off to the Chuo line and I'm on the Keihin-Tohoku. I got my train and got home to Akabane Station at 5:38am, almost exactly 19 hours after I'd left Kochi.
But, it was a nice ending to an otherwise lousy station escapade. Now if only next time I could end up sitting next to a nice talkative guy a little closer to my own age, you know?
Okay, time to crash for a bit now... to sum up, though, I would say that the last 11 days have been one of the best trips of my life. I'm already trying to figure out where my next Seishun 18 journey should be to, either over the winter or spring holidays, or just next summer again.
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BUT I seem to remember having some kind of issues in Gifu myself as well! I wish I remembered what they were, but I guess I blocked it from my memory.