My wish to go to Japan had been existing for several years already, when my best friend and I once again day-dreamed about how awesome it would be to really go there, to actually see all those buildings and shops and other things we've read about, seen on TV in documentary reports or in anime. It was February, and we've been day-dreaming about going there together for more than a year or even more than two years at that time, and just like always, we were searching for cheap flights and cheap hotels on the Internet, wishing to simply click on "book this flight" and "book a room", but knowing it would never be possible, because Japan was just soooo far away, and the whole journey would be too expensive for us, as we were mere high school students. Or so we thought.
Until I was sitting in the living room with my laptop on the coffee table, browsing through flights from British Airways over Lufthansa to Aeroflot, when my father suddenly came and was interested in how much such a return ticket to Japan actually was. I told him that right now, there were several flights from British Airways, Aeroflot and Airchina for about 680 € for a flight in August or September. To me, this still seemed to be quite expensive, but at least cheaper than those Lufthansa flights for about 1200 €. My father, however, said that for a return ticket, this was really cheap and if I was able to really book a flight for less than 700 €, he would pay the flight and give it to me as a present for my 18th birthday as well as for passing my final exams in June.
I was shocked. Like, really shocked. I'd never expected this. Actually, I didn't even believe him at first. Nevertheless, I was excited all of a sudden. Immediately, I wrote an email to my best friend, proclaiming the good news.
But what about her, you may wonder.
Well, as far as I was informed at that time, she already knew from her father that she'd get money for her birthday and for passing the final exams as well and that it would be enough to travel before starting to go to university. What I didn't know was whether her parents would permit her to go as far away as to Japan. Well, after the final exams we'd both be 18, so yeah... that shouldn't be a problem. And in the end, there was no problem, because her parents had already told her that she could go to Japan if she wanted to, since the two of us had been in London on our own the year before and there hadn't been any problems. So yeah...
Two months later, in April, our flight was booked as well as our hotel room in Tokyo. We had decided against our original plan which included visiting not only Tokyo, but also Kyoto, Hiroshima and Kagoshima within 3 weeks and staying in different guest families and/or hotels, and instead agreed on simply staying in Tokyo for 2 weeks, taking it slow. Two weeks, that was longer than we'd ever been away from home after all. Besides, Tokyo seemed interesting enough to us and there were so many things we wanted to do and see in that city alone.... We thought that - with our basic Japanese - it'd be the best not to do something complicated. We simply wanted to see what Japan really was like. The country, the Japanese culture, mentality, their way of life, their food, their customs...
So, in between studying like crazy for the final exams of our school life and studying even more, we decided where to go and which sights to visit in those rare free moments we had from the time we began to learn and learn and learn at the beginning of April and the first exams in May to the end of June, when the last exam was over. Often, this journey was the only thing that kept us motivated to go on and study and get this stuff finally over with.
And then all of a sudden, school was over for us. It was July, we were excited and counted the days until August 20, the day we'd start our journey, and finally, we were able to start planning "seriously". Japan being a country we imagined to be very differently from Germany, we tried to be prepared as best as possible. We were already able to speak some basic Japanese that would for example allow us to ask for the way or order in a restaurant, simple conversation like that. And thankfully, we also already knew how to read and write Hiragana and Katakana, which later helped us a lot, as well as some random kanji we've learned over the past few years. Still, we felt really unprepared, so we tried to improve our Japanese skills a bit and collected as much information as we could, for example about public transport in Tokyo, opening hours, locations and entry fees of different sights and attractions we wanted to see and visit, and so on.
Since I'm a big fan of organising things and making plans, I tried to fit as many sights as possible in one day, but - of course - I left lots of time for shopping and strolling around. Surely, we could've done all that planning spontaneously, too, but since we had so much time until our journey began, we thought it'd be best to plan it all beforehand in order to save time later on. As we wanted to see as much as possible of Tokyo, we planned to spend one day in one particular part of the city in order to avoid wasting a lot of time on the metro each day. Furthermore, our plan also included a day-trip to Kamakura, one to Enoshima and another one to Yokohama.
Then, all of a sudden, we were already standing at our town's station, waiting for our train to Tokyo, uhm, to Munich Airport. Time sure flies...
In the next few posts, I'll tell you about our flight from Munich to London Heathrow and from London Heathrow to Tokyo Narita Airport, about our arrival there as well as our way to the hotel. So stay tuned!
~Mina
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