Travel Journal – Tuesday 20/4 – 2010
Arcades, lost luggage and Kyoto…
Well, the past few days have been hectic so this is why I write this post and the following post on the 22nd instead of whenever it was. It’s hard to get time to write something when we always do stuff, you know?
Anyway this day it wasn’t raining anymore as I stated in the end of the last entry. So after we checked out from the ryokan we walked around and took pictures and watched some of the peace memorials in Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park where they had lots of displays of origami cranes which children have made for all the children that died. It was very amazing to see that many cranes in all the different colours and sizes not to mention that they had made pictures out of them combining different colours.
After we grew tired of watching this we decided to stop the old fashioned sight seeing and go and find something fun in the more central and modern part of Hiroshima. But after walking around a while I quickly realized how heavy my bag was with a laptop in it so we searched for a locker to put our bags in. After that we went around looking for interesting stuff. We soon ended up in an arcade. At first Drak tried this grip claw thing a few times but to no avail. Those things aren’t meant to be possible to succeed with. If you get anything its pure luck and very little skill. My theory is that you are meant to buy about 5-6 tries and with these you can get ONE thing from one of these things. If you are skilled you might succeed in as little as 3 tries but even so, it’s mostly luck.
We then ascended to the other levels in the arcade. Now, most arcades in Japan are similar built. They have these grip claw things on the entry level and then they have about 5-6 floors above it themed with different kinds of arcades. The second level where action games. Like FPS’s and a very cool 3D-ish arcade where you go into a dark chamber and control a Gundam. It’s a LAN game so all the Dark Chambers in the room end up in the same ruined city where they try to kill each other with various CS kind of ways. Only a lot more awesome than CS, and fun. Plus the graphics are astonishing. Not to mention the controls makes it feel real.
On this level we spent about 300-500 JPY each playing a co-op FPS where you have guns shooting enemies and monsters on the screen. We actually got pretty far before we stopped feeding the machine coins to get another life. It was fun doing it like that and I can easily see how someone can spend thousands of yen during one stay there with a good friend or someone fun to play with. You get lost in the game and it’s not much thinking either.
The third level though was Drak’s level. There were mostly fighting games here of different kinds. Like King of Fighter, Blazblue, Capcom vs blaha and so on. There were also games like a Japanese form of the Guitar Hero and Rock Band games. But mostly fighting. After playing a little there, mostly Drak, we checked the other floors. The fourth floor had a meaningless game where most things you could play were to bet on some play horses that you could control, or bet on or use as random factor for a lottery of some kind. The fifth level were for quizzes and to take photo shots after a dress up. But no, that was the sixth floor, the fifth were a slots-kind of game. That kind of game you can see in bars in Sweden. Not that interesting though even if you could win money. But that was the point of the Horse Level too.
After this we decided that we didn’t really like Hiroshima. The air was so humid that it was disgusting to walk around when every step you took felt like you walked through a cloud of mist and become covered with sheen of water and dirt. That, plus the most important cities along our planned route was Kyoto and Osaka. So we decided to eat and go to Kyoto with the first best train.
But, where were our luggage? The thirty or forty blocks of shops and various buildings were quite confusing to walk around and we had no idea really where we were. Sure we knew in general. But not specifically which street if someone had given us a map and asked us to show where we were. So then the hunt began. I remembered the area of the building, but of course most shops in Hiroshima had at least two to three duplicates randomly placed in the central area. In the end we found them even though it took time and it wasn’t the most pleasant of hours we spent walking around trying to find them I’ll say.
But in the end we were on a Shinkansen for Kyoto. This is pretty funny actually. The ticket from Tokyo to Hiroshima would have cost us about 14k JPY, one way. While the ticket from Hiroshima to Kyoto1 would have cost 21500 JPY, one way. This really makes one happy that we bought the JR Rail Pass. The Pass costs about 57900 JPY and not counting all the times we go with Shinkansen in Tokyo to speed up our trip back and forth from the centre, right now we’ve spent 14k+21k+5k2 = 40k JPY in Shinkansen travels. And we’re still in Kyoto. Then add the Shinkansen trips in Tokyo and the regular trips with the train (about 500-800 JPY a day) and the few bus rides we’ve had and the future return from Kyoto and possible other expeditions and one can easily see how the Rail Pass is a life saver. If we had been more active in the beginning, we would have saved even more money now.
Well, when we came to Kyoto it was dark so we tried to find a hostel. In the beginning we went in the completely opposite directions3 and spent about 30 minutes walking in the wrong direction. But soon we found the hostel we were searching for only to be denied it once again. It was full. But they were kind and spoke good English so one of the Night Staff knew the owner of a nearby Ryokan and got us a discount price for a room there, and we made reservations for the next night at the Hostel, they had internet and is the cheapest in town! So we went and slept at the other place intending to return tomorrow.
Best Regards,
Herid Fel
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