Zombies in Toyland

Our plan was simple, take an overnight plane, sleep on the flight, and then enjoy a full day in Tokyo.

Funny how things never work out the way you planned, isn’t it? Our of all the flights we were taking on the holiday, the one where we absolutely needed to sleep was the one on which we could not get an exit aisle seat. For those who aren’t aware, I’m quite big, and don’t fit particularly well in the normal cattle-class seats. As an aside, I don’t see how anyone could fit well in those seats, but being both long, and wide, I fit less well than other people.

So we arrive in Japan at about 8 in the morning, having left Germany at 1pm the previous afternoon. It was only a 12 hour flight, but in “real time” it was quite a bit more than that. Of course, against our planning, we’d managed to get maybe 2 hours sleep. So not a good start.

We could not check in when we got to the hotel, so we decided to head off into Tokyo, and look around. Being a nerd, the place I really wanted to go was Akihabara, the place to buy all your nerdly items, from electronics, to toys, to videogames. Of course, by the time we got there, we were in no condition to wander around and spend lots of money. Money, by the way we did not have. We’d changed all our remaining Euros at the hotel, but that was hardly enough money to buy our train tickets. It’s damnably hard to get international money from an ATM in Japan. We asked several people, and in the end found that only Post Office controlled ATMs allow international cards.

Cash in hand, we started to stumble around the shops, looking at cool things that we will never see in Australia. But I was too tired to actually consider the purchase of anything. After a couple of hours of aimless wandering, we decided that the best idea we could think of was to go back to the hotel, and try and sleep, and start fresh the next morning.

Of course, nothing ever goes according to plan, does it…