shuupatsu! it’s our day of travel.
woke up at 6am, and almost quietly grabbed our crap and left the hostel around 630-45. we were supposed to tell them if we were planning to leave before 8 but… we forgot so we just left a note 😛
at kyoto, i stopped to look at the boarding times while leon and michelle went somewhere else. i look back and they’re gone! no clue where they went 🙁 waited for a while and got a bit impatient so i went towards the last direction that i saw them going… no luck. hmm… maybe they went down to the coin lockers, where’s the elevator? hmmmmmmmmmmmm maybe after 10 minutes in total of not knowing where they were, they show up near the escalator and they had indeed went down to the coin lockers, michelle and i were to lock our stuff up at kyoto while we went with leon to the airport… aiya.
jumped onto the train straight to kansai airport which took about an hour. during this time i finished my 5th book! chronicles of narnia, the horse’s boy or somethin. pretty good so far, i guess…
arrived and figured out the kansai airport, for the future, and accompanied leon to the check-in gate, which didn’t take too long at all, and up to the security gates which the lines were extremely long, but moved fairly quickly. we couldnt go with him farther, so we left at that point and headed back to kyoto station. felt as if the trip was ending… 🙁
our plan was at first to visit the kyoto handicraft centre where they sold a bunch of souvenirs and stuff but we scrapped that earlier because we would have to take a bus all the way there then back, in time to catch our own train, heading to kumamoto to stay with my friend. but because of the time we got back to kyoto, we decided to head to the uniqlo that we first saw across the tracks when we first got to kyoto… although we didnt exactly know where it was T_T… walked out, chose one way, and… no luck. dead end… but i went to go buy eneloop batteries at some bic camera department store. and not much time to go to find uniqlo again… we then decided (or remembered) we gotta get my friend something! found a small dessert thing that looked cool at the station and grabbed that.
tried to find some lunch but we headed to shin-osaka since we had to transfer there anyways. took the shinkansen to kokura and for some crazy reason we had 7 minutes between that and the next train we had to catch… and of course, we missed it – -;… the next one would be 2 hours later… scrambled a bit, stressed a lot, i didnt write down my friend’s phone number so we had no way of reaching him… and then we asked the JR attendant and our new route would be kokura to hakata to kumamoto to hikari no mori. the connecting time between hakata and kumamoto was 9 minutes, not bad… but kumamoto to hikari no mori, 3 minutes. is that humanly possible?!
when we arrived at hakata, 9 minutes…. there were no elevators or escalators… and 2 flights of stairs – -;.. it was friggen evil, we had to carry and drag our luggages up them, horrible. but we DID catch our train, sweating horribly. and stressing for our next transfer, 3 minutes :S yikes.
as soon as we got NEAR kumamoto, we got ready at the doors in order to jump off the train and rush to the next one. since i studied that stupid route, it took only a little bit to distinguish, we gotta go that direction! that train! that platform! gogogo!!! we ran with our luggage, crazy. the doors closed right behind me T_T… we werent even sure if it was the right train……….. after the first stop, we knew we were fine. phew. altho we’d be arriving about 10 minutes later than we should have… oops.
finally arrived at hikari no mori ‘forest of lights’ and when we showed our JR passes to leave the station, the attendant only saw michelle’s and said… “michelle? and andrew?” and we’re like… o.o wtf. how the hell did u know… just weird for a moment, but apparently my friend, david, left a message and a phone number to give him a call when we arrived.
prior to this trip, i’ve only known david through my fansubbing of one piece, which has been almost 6 years, so i’ve actually ‘known’ him for 6 years… but have never met him or really talked to him. so u don’t really know what to expect. i only knew that he was from the u.s. and…. worked in engineering… and… yea. since we didnt know what he looked like, we just kept looking around wondering… maybe that’s him! or him… hmm, that one? but he pulled up close-by and that was easy. haha…
david’s really tall. from pittsburgh. 4 other siblings. and although he always seems to talk like he’s so much older online, he’s only about 4-5 years older! crazy. he’s a pretty quiet person usually… so yea.
he drove us back to his apartment, which isn’t that small, easily fit me and michelle in the carpeted area 0.o… which i guess is meant as a living room? sure. he’s a bit messy, but its all good 😛 one thing that we’ve taken notice of is that he leaves a lot of his doors unlocked o.o his car, his apartment, there’s like no fear of theft. his neighbourhood is also pretty quiet tho, we passed a lot of countryside to get here, where there’s still some civilization.
anyways, after chilling for about half an hour, it got dark outside, and we went off to meet up with two of his friends, keith and rie, at some restaurant they go to. we ordered some chicken dish, which was pretty good… keith and david are usually pretty quiet ppl, apparently, and i’m already really quiet too, so there are random and odd spaces of silence, which are a little bit awkward… but i guess that’s inevitable for people who have just met and don’t know what to talk about… meh. they were both pretty nice, keith’s from… some other state in the u.s. and rie’s from japan. we just all talked about places in japan, how we knew each other, their friends, random stuff like that.
afterwards we went off to ‘dragon kitchen’ a chinese-type dessert place (sorta) where michelle and i had parfaits and they had bbt and sherbet and… other stuff. again, more random conversations and then we started critiquing the business card, which was…. pretty bad, for such a nice looking place. the printing was nasty too :S o well…
and after a bit, we all headed home. we would see keith and rie again on saturday, for some dinner party… we’re gonna meet a lot of interesting and random ppl through david…
back at his place, we have two futons setup and we took over his closet with our luggage. both of us stayed up for a while before showering or sleeping just on the internet updating our blogs and doing random stuff. david had work the next day so he was asleep… we were to head off to kumamoto castle, suizenji park, and the small covered shopping streets in the kumamoto area.
started to feel a little homesick… but that might be because leon left, we brought him to the airport… the trip changes, and then there was the stressful 6 or 7 hour shinkansen/subway/train trip to get to david’s place in hikari no mori… *sigh*… leon, come back! 😛
leon going through security, where we couldn’t follow him any longer.
he doesn’t look sad at all! lol
me at my friend’s, david’s (dythim), place
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