Wednesday January 21 and Thursday January 22
Despite 3 late nights in a row we had yet anothe an early alarm as the kids wanted to visit the Tokyo Metro Museum on our final day….. and we had to pack up and store our luggage. We unfortunately couldn’t leave our bags in our apartment for a couple of extra hours. After we packed up we bid farewell to our Tokyo apartment we set off for the morning.
A morning of drama…
We were planning to store the bags in the extensive luggage storage lockers at Ueno station. All was going well until the 4th locker didn’t print the receipt and just started beeping at us. After it had locked our bags in! Cue panic. No one at the station could help and we had to ring the locker company. We had data only sims. So we had to use our Australian sim, and had a probably very expensive phone call, where we battled with our very limited Japanese and the locker company not speaking English. We needed to use google translate over the phone, but we finally got the receipt printed, and had some hope of retrieving our bags in a few hours. A drama we didn’t need!
We then discovered the metro line out to the museum was delayed. The kids had really wanted to go to the Metro museum and weren’t having any part of not going and doing an alternate activity. A bus to the museum was going to take an extra hour, which was not ideal when we had limited time. We decided to try our luck on the metro and by the time we got to the delayed line, it was running again as far as we needed to go at least (Edogawa Ward). So crisis averted!
We hadn’t been to this part of Tokyo during either this stay or our previous stay. We didn’t have a lot of time for sightseeing but did enjoy the short walk from the Kasai metro station over to the museum.
Tokyo Metro Museum
The Metro museum is a railway museum with exhibits about the Tokyo city subway. Astrid and Soren had been banging on about going here for the whole trip, and it turned out to be quite interesting. The museum is owned by the Metro Cultural Foundation which is a non-profit organisation of the Tokyo Metro. The museum is relatively compact and we were visiting on a Wednesday so it was very quiet aside from a lot of young preschool aged children.
The museum has a large number of original train cars, which you can tour, which was rather fun. There are also a number of exhibits explaining how the metro tunnels are dug and maintained, which is fascinating.
The giant hole digging machines were impressive!
Aside from a fun show which had trains running around model tracks (with lights) there was also a simulator for driving a train. The kids (and Anto) all enjoyed being train drivers, under the supervision of the helpful guides.
The museum was filled with Japanese preschoolers this morning and we appeared to be the only English speaking people in the entire place. Luckily most of the exhibits had English on them. It was a very informative and relatively interesting museum. The entry price was also super cheap at only a couple of dollars each. As a bonus there were a heap of ‘train stamps’ to collect throughout the museum, so the kids were filling up the last of their collection for the trip.
We’d also promised the kids a Gashapon (capsule machine) on the last day of the trip, when we had some coins to use up. Astrid, Soren and Anto all did theirs at the museum so they could get train related items. Zinnia was not keen on train prizes and held off.
The others did end up with some cute items and enjoyed their Gashapon experience!
The final konbini visit…..
The museum isn’t very big so we were done in a bit over an hour. It was freezing outside again, so we head across the road for our last konbini visit of the trip. The last snacks and coffees were purchased. We had been visiting convenience stores all over Japan for our entire trip and we all seemed to have developed preferences of which snack or coffee we prefer between 7-11, Lawson and Family Mart! The kids also had their preferred drinks from vending machine brands too 🙂
We had to laugh at the entire wall of microwaves in many of the convenience stores, so you can heat up your meals!
Back to Ueno and off to Narita…
We returned to Ueno station to pick up our bags and thankfully there were no dramas getting them out. A relief when we had flight to catch!
Zinnia found a Hello Kitty Gashapon machine for her toy at Ueno station, much to Soren’s disgust! After 3 weeks in Japan, he was sick of Hello Kitty and the rest of us thought it was hilarious.
We’d bought tickets on the Skyliner train to Narita, so aside from a short freezing walk outside and an annoying uphill ramp with all the bags, it didn’t take us too long to get out to Narita.
Luckily we were on the Skyliner close to first and we got luggage space (the seats are all reserved but the luggage space is not). There were some interesting arrangements of bags elsewhere, including next to Astrid.
The final Japanese meal…
When we arrived at Narita airport we planned to get changed into our warm weather clothes as we were landing in Fiji in the humidity. It was however, currently 3 degrees outside and some people were not so keen on giving up the jeans for shorts, I braved it though! We did however stuff all the coats and jackets away into the checked luggage.
We had been warned our gate was a 15 minute walk away so once we were through security and immigration, we head off to find some food towards our gate. It was now after 3pm so people were a bit hungry, having only snacked on convenience store pastry products a couple of hours ago.
We later discovered the area with multiple dining options was on the other side of the airport and we definitely did not have time to do the 30 minute trek over. There were a couple of places near our gate. One of them even appeared to have 2 vegetable dishes (or at least you’d think so from the pictures). As they did have allergens marked we did note they managed to put lamb, beef, fish and chicken in a veggie curry. So I continued my Japan dieting and no lunch for me. I wasn’t the only person asking about vegetarian food and getting shown plain rice as the option. The others all enjoyed their last katsu and ramens though!
Fiji bound….
Our flight from Tokyo to Nadi (Fiji) boarded early only to have us all sit at the gate ready to go for about 45 minutes. Luckily we had a nice tailwind so despite taking off half an hour late we landed early. Soren had ended up in the separate aisle seat, much to Astrid’s disgust who was made to sit in the middle with us.
Soren was next to a 15 year old Japanese boy and they made friends and then proceeded to spend the entire night playing UNO and drinking tea. He had a wonderful time but did zero sleeping 🙂
Zinnia spent most of the time laying all over me and fighting with Astrid who didn’t want Zinnia laying on her. This resulted in not a lot of rest for anyone. The joys of traveling with children!
We landed at 4am Fiji time (which was 1am Tokyo time). This was not fabulous for sleeping as they did the ‘breakfast service’ about 3 hours from landing.
We ‘only’ had a 5 hour layover on the way back, rather than the full day on the way over. So it was off to transit for us. Soren had to say goodbye to his new friend who was staying in Fiji.
The long jet lagged layover…
Nadi airport is always noisy and crowded and there are never any spots to sit. It was pretty much deserted at 4.30am aside from our one plane of people, only about half of whom were transiting. We didn’t trust this was going to last though. We did some duty free shopping and decided with more than 4 hours to kill still we’d just pay for lounge access, for some showers and decent food and coffee.
The lounge just opened at 5am so it was pretty quiet when we arrived. We were all straight into the food, you’d think we hadn’t seen fruit or cereal in weeks 😉 After 45 rounds of breakfast and showers we all felt a lot better.
Soren told me he wasn’t feeling all that well and I suggested maybe he should have slept at some point on the flight out of Tokyo. Straight after his shower he was asleep in his chair and we had to wake him up for boarding. Zinnia wasn’t far behind. About an hour after we arrived the lounge was packed so the general area would have likely been worse.
Canberra here we come!
When we boarded our flight to Canberra we had to go out into the sunshine and was already 29 degrees at 9am, a bit of a shock after 3 weeks of Wintery Japan weather! The flight to Canberra was also packed but they’d swapped the aircraft to the older 737 so no seat back entertainment and less leg room. This has happened to us a couple of times on Fiji Airways. There new planes the economy is pretty good, but old ones are rather uncomfortable.
The WiFi for the entertainment system only worked for the people in about the first 4 rows, and we of course were at the back. So it was a long 4.5 hours……. but most of the time we were all napping, or at least Soren was napping on me and Astrid and Zinnia on Anto.
We did make it back to Canberra and eventually home by around 2pm. All a bit weary but glad for some sunshine and warmth and happy to see our pets and own beds!
We managed to not lose any kids in busy Japanese cities or train stations and despite all the shopping we only came home with 18kg of extra luggage 🙂 Japan was done and dusted and we’d enjoyed our further exploring of this interesting country and it’s culture. The snow and skiing were huge hits with the kids and we had enjoyed our break from the hot Aussie Summer.
The globe trotting kids will no doubt convince us to return to Japan again soon. Astrid is heading there for a school trip later in the year, but next on the cards was a trip to the far more tropical New Caledonia. Those blogs will be up soon 🙂 For now Sayonara from Japan….