lost in Japan adventure!

David's cousin Amelia is here visiting and she and I decided yesterday to take the train into Chiba City and get some stuff done. John dropped us off at the train station at 11:15 and helped us buy our first tickets. It's nearly and hour and a half train ride and we made it to Chiba. We were so stoked to arrive and be in the right place and everything! So, we decided to go eat some lunch! The first place we tried was closed....we wante to go there because their menu had a lot of pictures! Oh well, so we chose another place that had food displayed in the window and looked cheap. We were pretty surprised when we were seated at a table with other people...turns out it's the kinda place with big tables instead of small tables and everyone just sits together. Pretty fun! Although, not a whole lot of pictures of the menu, so when the waitress came Amelia just pointed at someone elses food and gestured "two" with her hands.....it worked! We both got a nice bowl of "Raw-men" noodles and it was cheap too! Anyway, we left there and wandered around the city for a few hours. I bought a new external harddrive (which was the main purpose of the trip, aside from adventure) and we also found starbucks, where we got some coffee, YAY! The rest of our time there was filled with laughing at hilarious English on t-shirts and perusing a 6 story mall with VEEERY expensive cothing, weird furniture, and a ¥100 store where we spent ever more time after discovering that everything was $1.

Well, then it looked like it was going to start raining to so we decided to head back to the station. Surprisingly we were not overly lost and found it with ease. Getting correct tickets to go home, on the other hand, was not so succesful. We found and information booth with a lady that spoke English and she pretty much just took up time that we needed to get the the train we thought was leaving at 5:30; no help at all! Oh well, we just went to the machine and bought the tickets that sounded pretty good and headed for the train. Upon arriving where we thought we should be, the train we thought we would see was not there, but instead a local train that said it was going to the correct destination. Riding the local train is alright, it just takes another half and hour longer and we had payed for express tickets. We remembered that we needed a local train to get to Soga before transfering to the express, so we jumped on the local train and got off at Soga. But, when we got there and showed our tickets to someone in charge they said we needed to change our tickets. So, they changed them for us and gave us ¥400 back...score! Well, the express train came and we got on...but upon arriving at Kuratsua Yamoitaria (or something like that, I have no idea) everyone got off the train and we had to also. BUT!! As we got off and looked across the tracks there was a local train that said "Kamogawa", where we needed to go! So, we just jumped on there and figured that it'd get us there eventually, so whatever!

After getting on the train we started looking at this map to see if it looked right and we had pretty much convinced ourselves that it was and then we started recognizing people; we were in the exact same car on the same train that we had started out on when we left Chiba the first time.All we did was get off at Soga, take an express to this other station (after a bit of a wait) and get back on the same train again! We were laughing soooo hard! anyway, we made it home in exactly 2 hours with such a fun story to tell!

So, that was my day and my first experience with traveling on the trains without someone that speaks Japanese. And wow, everything is soooo much harder when you can't even try and pronounce stuff that you see written because it's not in Roman letters!