Day 13- Niigata

It was a very early start for us this morning, as we needed to womble round the apartment and get rid of all the mess we’d made before checking out. Several very full plastic carrier bags later, we headed down to the station, pausing only to make ourselves look even more like crazy tourists by filming the musical crossing signals.

After a rather uneventful Shinkansen journey, we arrived in Tokyo station. Having decided earlier in the day that we would spend a few hours in Akihabara before leaving for Niigata, we started to hunt for a locker that would be big enough to keep Sarah’s suitcase in with the handle still stuck. Unfortunately, when we actually found some lockers that may have done the trick, they were all already taken- in fact, it seemed that every locker, regardless of size or shape, was already in use. Realising just how much fun it would be to drag all of our bags on the packed train lines in the middle of the day, we decided to give up, grab some bento and just try and find the next train to Nagaoka.

On the way to the bento shop, Sarah insisted that she had to buy something from Tokyo Banana, if only to get one of the bags that they were giving out. We stopped for a moment while she tried to work out what they were actually selling, and bought a box of banana-shaped cakes with some sort of mushy banana filling.

We went and stood on the platform to wait for the train, thinking that we could stake our place in the queue and hopefully get good seats when it arrived. This is when Sarah got distracted yet again. While we were waiting for our train to arrive, a Pokémon Shinkansen pulled up at the next platform, and Sarah quickly set out on a mission to get as many photos of the Pokémon covered train as she possibly could, leaving Helen sitting in the queue looking after all the bags. Eventually, the Pokémon train left, with our own train arriving shortly after.

We took our seats on the train in the downstairs section of the two-layer compartment, and started to tuck into our bento. Helen had decided to be safe with tonkatsu bento, which we had tried on our last train journey, but was still surprised with some tempura on the side. Sarah was slightly more brave, or foolish depending on you point of view, and had some kind of mystery fish/chicken.

We arrived in Nagaoka, and successfully managed to find the right connecting train which would take us to Nagatori. We met Jonathan, Yuko and Elly on the platform, and were very happy to discover how much cooler it was here compared to Kyoto! We went back to Yuko’s parents’ house, unpacked a little and then went back out with Sarah’s family to get some groceries and try and find somewhere that would fix her suitcase (which, it turns out, was a bit too much to hope for). Whilst at the supermarket, we discovered some of the sweets we’d tried earlier in the week, and decided to replenish our stock, as well as getting some Pokémon shaped jelly sweets and some koala biscuits on Elly’s recommendation.

We came back to the house and had our evening meal, before going outside to play with some very impressive Japanese sparklers.

Unfortunately our internet connection here is a bit sketchy since they have dial-up, so don’t expect posts for the next couple of days. We should get one more out when we get back to Tokyo.