Tuesday was my last day in Tokyo, but not my last day of the Grutto pass. With a flight booked out of Sapporo on the 31st, I was running out of days to move north. While I would have enjoyed another week in Tokyo, I had figured out a way to travel north without paying a fortune in train tickets and hitting a couple of destinations on the way to Hokkaido. Copious amounts of research had discovered night buses to Sendai and an overnight ferry from Sendai to a port on Hokkaido. Though that was the tentative plan, until I had tickets in my hand, I couldn’t exactly rest easy. And, I certainly can’t afford tickets unless I get some Japanese yen.
So, my first order of business, after packing my luggage and moving it to the storage room was to find the Tokyo branch of the ICBC and see if they had any relevant advice regarding my ATM woes. The ICBC was in a nondescript building across the street from the Imperial Palace. I had literally been there exactly one week ago and missed it in the cloudy intermittently drizzling morning.
Apparently, Tuesday is rain day in Tokyo, but this was no mere drizzle. If it was the end of summer, I would swear we were in a typhoon. Wind blew sheets of rain from every angle, while the stronger gusts, possibly augmented by the shapes of the skyscrapers utterly wrecked the fragile metal frames of lesser umbrellas. Despite periods of lighter rain, the overall effect was a complete drenching.
The ICBC was fruitless, though friendly. They confirmed what I had feared: my chip-based card is utterly useless in Japan. I asked about currency exchange. They didn’t handle a cash business there, but suggested I try the Bank of China around the block. The BoC had a paper sign saying they cancelled foreign cash transactions last year. Plan Z was to find a “smart exchange” machine advertised at the front desk of the hostel. There was one in the Tokyo train station, which also happened to be right there. So, the advertisement purported a coupon for a better rate via a QR code, which I dutifully saved on my phone, but the machine had no way to read said QR code. Aren’t there laws about bait-and-switch or how about just the baseline 10+% margins on the exchange rates? I plugged all my US money in because the rate was slightly less usurious, but still had to eat some of the horrendous exchange rate on the RMB. Who would have thought that the bad rate I got off the boat in Fukuoka was actually a decent rate after all?
There were a couple of museums near the train station which I figured I should visit since I was in no rush to get to Yokohama. The Mitsuo Aida Museum, located in a convention center, was surprisingly nice. Mitsuo Aida was a poet and calligrapher, and all of the poems had English translations on the accompanying placards. The brushstrokes were bold and uninhibited, but still mostly readable to my untrained eye, while the poems themselves were succinct and koan-like. Literally, the first said (paraphrase) “When it rains, be in the rain. When the wind blows, be in the wind.” How did he know there was a pseudo-typhoon happening outside?
I went to the Intermediatheque next. It was located in a shopping mall and is always free admission. I was expecting some sort of modern exercise in multimedia artworks, but it was actually more of a natural history museum as curated by artists. It had a 19th century Industrial Revolution/colonialist vibe with skeletons and taxidermied animals kept in antique display cases. I don’t if it is better to describe it as gothic or steampunk, but it had a very Victorian air to it. But, again, despite being antique scientific equipment and tons of specimens from the natural world, the arrangements were presented to be aesthetically arresting. Definitely worth repeat visits.
On the way back to the hostel, and with water squishing in my shoes, I popped into the Mitsui Memorial Museum, which was located on the seventh floor of a historic bank building. There were mostly Buddhist artworks and such. I made a pretty quick pass through, and was thinking about getting a spot of lunch at the hostel and working on my computer while drying off for a while.
However, when I returned to the hostel, I found they had a lunch rush, which precluded me spreading out and lounging for a couple hours. I grabbed my stuff and hobbled over to the train station to go directly to Yokohama. On the bright side, I caught an express train, got a seat, and didn’t need to transfer.
I got off at Yokohama station and wandered around for a bit, trying to find a JR Bus ticket window to buy my bus ticket for the following night. I eventually backtracked from the bus terminal to the train station to inquire at the tourist information desk, which notified me that there was no ticket office. I would have to book the ticket via phone, online, or at a service terminal in a convenience store. They directed me to a 7-Eleven two floors down which didn’t have said service terminal. God, these tourist information desks are pretty consistently unhelpful. I found a Lawson’s and spent close to 20 minutes trying to figure out how to find the bus route I knew existed. It didn’t help that the terminal was only available in Japanese, but I guess I’ve picked up enough reading ability that it didn’t really hinder me as much as the bad user interface. The bus routes were indexed under prefecture names, not city names.
I thought about plopping down at the Starbucks next door to rest a bit, but figured I would try my luck checking into the hostel an hour early so I could actually change into dry clothes and start some laundry. I was getting pretty desperate for clean clothes, having never hit the right window of having ready cash and time to wait around for the washing machine in Tokyo.
It was a pretty nice hostel with a spacious dorm room only occupied by one other person, so I took the liberty of spreading out a bit. I started the laundry and made a cup of coffee and sat down in the living room to work on my computer. There were a couple guests hanging out in the living room, but they were all speaking to each other in Japanese. It was actually quite weird how there was an old man getting a massage from a female guest and middle aged woman hanging out. The old man turned out to be my roommate and he got pissy with me for using a bit of rope to make a temporary clothesline that he had to duck under to access his locker, which he did every ten fucking minutes. The guy really set off my spidey sense, always keeping his backpack with him, sneaking around, and keeping a large stack of postal boxes.
It seemed I didn’t have much better luck socially in this hostel, so I headed out alone at dinner time to wander around in adjacent Chinatown. Yokohama is another historic port city of Japan and has a sizable Chinese population. After more than a hundred years of having between 3-5000 Chinese residents, the Chinese population had shot up to 20,000 since 1995 (I hope I’m remembering that correctly. I saw it later in a museum that banned photography). Needless to say, as I wandered Chinatown I overheard lots of Chinese, but its so annoying to get approached in English by the restaurant touts, especially when I was wearing a shirt with Chinese on it.
A lot of the restaurants advertised all-you-can-eat deals which sounded pretty tempting, but I had the vague suspicion that the unwritten fine print is that you need 2 or 3 people at the table. Other than that, most of the restaurants advertised set meals with various combinations of rice, noodles, and dimsum. It is really hard to decide what to eat when pretty much everywhere has virtually the same menu and similar prices. I must have spent more than an hour looking every restaurant over three or four times before just going for one. The food was alright, but it didn’t satisfy me. So, once again, I swung by a supermarket for a little post-dinner snacks and beer.
I hung out in the hostel living room while the old man watched some stupid television program about the right and wrong ways to sit down. He lit up when the middle aged woman with curlers in her hair came in and they started conversing. Another fellow who came in the room asked if he could chat with me. He was Taiwanese, but had lived in Japan for a long time. I never even told him I could speak Chinese.
When I finished my beer, I jumped in the shower and got ready for bed.
| Pasmo top-up | 1000 |
| Chicken (Lawsons) | 170 |
| Hostel (1 night) | 124.88 RMB |
| Sweet and Sour Pork | 950 |
| Snacks | 605 |
| Total: | 299.28 RMB (USD 43.28) |
Running Total: 35563.6 RMB (USD 5143.93)
Daily Average: 312 RMB (USD 45.12)
For the record, I saved another 2100 yen on museum admissions with the Grutto Pass.
I bought an additional 46,659 yen for 2100 RMB + 160 USD (or 3206 RMB equivalent) for a new personal exchange rate of 6.9 (starting the next day). In other words, every 100 yen I spend now costs an additional 0.5 RMB, i.e. everything is 7% more expensive in real terms.