Today I spent all of two hours at work before leaving early to… get this… get a haircut. Mr. Hayashi even drove me there so he could leave early as well.
They did the usual bang-up job on my follicles for 1000 yen, and then I went back home to relax and do some studying. At about 3:30 I packed my overnight backpack and went to the train station.
Kuniko had invited me to join her along with Tomo-chan, her friend from Tokyo who just moved to Kyoto, for dinner. I left with plenty of extra time, and even had time to do some shopping at the giant bookstore in Umeda station.
Then I got on Hankyu train line.
I’ve only been on Hankyu once before, with Antoine, and it wasn’t so easy to figure out. They run all of their different types of trains on the same track, so you need to choose the right one. As I found out later, you don’t choose the right platform, rather, you choose the right train. You should just wait at your platform until the right one comes along.
To make a long and frustrating story short, I made every wrong move you could possibly make on this trip. First, I started on a slow train, so I got off that at the next stop, and a faster one came along at another platform. That ended up taking me the wrong way, but I didn’t figure that out until I passed four or five stops.
Then, once I made it back, I got on a slow train to make sure that at least I was going the right way. Two stations later, the slow train pulled aside and sat there for ten minutes, while two fast trains went rushing by. I ended up being twenty minutes late meeting Kuniko and Tomo-chan.
When I got to the gate they weren’t there. I felt terrible. They had probably went off to eat dinner and were waiting for me to call them when I got in. The problem was, I forgot to bring Kuniko’s phone number with me. So I had to just sit around and hope they came back. It was the second time I considered getting a mobile phone – maybe I should really consider it.
After about fifteen minutes, Kuniko came running back. The good news was that they hadn’t eaten yet – they just went over to the other station in that town to see if I was on the wrong train line. I explained as much as I could and apologized, apologized, apologized. Being late in Japan is never a good thing.
Despite the delay we ended up having a nice evening. We went to an izakaya and ate lots of tasty stuff. The drinks were interesting – I just had beer, but Kuniko had a strange grape flavored drink that had alcohol in the form of a colorless, tasteless liquid called “Hoppy”. Tomo-chan had two big fruit based drinks, and I think after those she was starting to feel the effects.
It was good to talk to Tomo-chan and hear about her new job and her plans for the future. She is going to have to live in Singapore as part of the new job for four months. She’s excited about it, but a little nervous. She’ll mainly be speaking English there, so I offered to help her with her English. Hopefully she’ll take me up on it.
After dinner we walked back to the station and went our separate ways. Kuniko had invited me over to stay the night at her place, and since my schedule at work is pretty flexible, I took her up on it. We had a nice relaxing evening watching some of the Olympics before we went to bed.
