A Visit from Honeybunny & Lessons Learned

This weekend, my girlfriend came to visit me. She's stationed in a city called Komagane in the southern part of a prefecture called Nagano. You may have heard of Nagano City from when the winter Olympics were held back in 1998, but Komagane is actually a few hours bus ride south of Nagano City.  Anyways, we've been planning this trip for a while, and all the plans were made. We were hoping the trip would go without a hitch, but alas we were not so lucky.

It is impossible to get straight from Komagane to Aomori. Komagane is locked in a valley between two mountain ranges, and the nearest airport is hours away in Matsumoto. Even if you got to the airport, there is no direct flight to Aomori. You would instead need to fly to Tokyo and transfer to another domestic flight. Flying is also very expensive in Japan, costing an equivalent of about $400 for what would be an equivalent to a flight from L.A. to San Francisco.

The best option is to take the bus or the train, but once again, there is no direct route from Nagano prefecture to Aomori. You still need to use Tokyo as the main transfer point to get anywhere, which is rather annoying. The only feasible option to get to Tokyo is the highway bus, which take a few hours. From Tokyo, you can take the bullet train, limited express trains, or an overnight bus to Aomori. The overnight bus is much cheaper than the trains (costing less than half), so we vouched for that option. However, these require online reservations, so we needed to do that.

All the tickets had been purchased and printed, and Honeybunny left Komagane on the highway bus, making sure to leave about an hour and a half of leeway between arrival in Tokyo (Shinjuku) and departure from Tokyo (Ueno, about a 20 min subway ride away). Unfortunately, the highway bus from Komagane was morbidly late, and by the time she arrived in Shinjuku, the bus to Aomori had already departed. You may have some preconceptions that everything is Japan is always efficient, reliable, and on time. This is definitely true for the train system, which runs by the second and is reliable beyond belief (when it's not snowing). Buses, on the other hand, are not nearly as reliable. For the city buses in Aomori, there is a chart describing what stops there are and how long it takes to get from one stop to another. I've had buses take twice as long as promised to get to the destination. The highway bus Honeybunny took was late by 2 whole hours!

Furthermore, since she had a problem with her passport and legal paperwork, she didn't have a cell phone. So, it was past 9 pm, and she was stuck in Tokyo with no cell phone, no way to get to Aomori, and no place to stay for the night. She desperately called me on a payphone for help, and I had to ask an ALT friend for help booking an emergency room at a hotel (which were packed because of the 3-day weekend) and telling her how to get there on the labyrinth of trains which is the Tokyo Metropolitan Public Transport System. I managed to give her direction right as she ran out of coins and the payphone cut off.

She arrived at her hotel at around 11:30 pm, but there was trouble actually getting her room. The hotel clerks didn't speak English, and Honeybunny's Japanese isn't sparkling either. I got a phone call from the hotel asking me for the reservation information, so I gave him all I could. It wasn't enough. This hotel was kind of stuck in the last century, so they didn't have a working computer or printer. I ended up forwarding the email confirmation to Honeybunny, and she used her (inactive) iPhone and hotel wifi to download it. I had already paid by credit card, but the clerk wanted paper proof (by fax!) that I had paid already. Being unable to give him any, we had to pay for the room in cash and ask for a refund on the credit card later. All that mattered to me was that she had a safe place to stay and get a good night's rest.

The next day, she headed back to Tokyo Station to try to catch the earliest bullet train to Aomori. At this point, we had already lost the 4500 yen (or about $55+) for the bus reservation. She had used up too much of her cash paying for the hotel room (which was 5880 yen (or about $70+), so she didn't have enough to pay for the train (which is about 17,000 yen, or about $200+). She needed to go to the nearest post office (and subsequently, bank) to withdraw money, and I had to help her find one. A few payphone calls and ATM malfunctions later, she finally had cash in hand and boarded the bullet train to Aomori. Thank god the fiasco is over...

After she got here, I didn't even really care about what just happened the day before, nor the fact that we just lost more than 25,000 yen. She made it over safely, and being together again was worth much more than the money spent to get her here. We didn't go around too much while she was here, but we spent most of our time hanging out together either at the beach park or at home. We also went to the grocery store and bought lots of seafood, since her prefecture is landlocked and sadly lacking in fresh fish. We made lots of home-cooked meals, and it was cute when she started salivating uncontrollably from the nostalgic taste of my cooking. We took some pictures in the living room for memories:

I also gave her an early birthday present, which was a hand-sketched portrait of the both of us before we left for Japan:

It was sad when she needed to leave the next night, but it was nice to be reminded of each others' presence before another long separation. Next time, it's my turn to make the journey, and I hope the trip turns out much smoother than hers did.