A late night Hiroshima adventure

It's 4AM here and I'm pretty wide awake, despite only sleeping about 5 hours last night. This big time change will probably take a few days to adjust to.

Meeting up with Katie last night proved more difficult than anticipated. There were buses to Hiroshima Bus Center and Hiroshima Station. I knew Katie was at the bus center, but due to my misinterpreting an email (and missing a key piece of info in my jet-lagged state), I took the wrong bus. When I got to the Station (not realizing I had made a mistake), I didn't see Katie, so I decided to wait. After no sign of Katie, I found a payphone to call her on the cell phone we were renting. Well, I called the number, and it made the wrong number beeps. I tried a few more times with more money, thinking I hadn't put in enough, but still nothing (since it was a bad number, I at least kept getting my money back). Since rule #1 of meeting someone is don't move, I waited around for ~45 minutes in the hope that she would find me, not knowing she was in a different part of town.

After waiting for a long time, getting nervous, tired, and still unable to get the payphone to work, I went to a nearby hotel hoping to find someone who could help me call Katie. The hotel staff spoke limited English, but he eventually they made my phone problem clear. He looked at the number I was trying to call and was very puzzled. He tried it on a payphone, then on his desk phone, and it didn't work. The number just didn't look right to him. Eventually, I explained that it was a mobile number, and he figured out that I was missing a very important digit in the area code (basically, I had the international version of the number, not the domestic version). So finally, after about 15 minutes, I was able to call a very worried and confused Katie on her cell phone.

Once I talked to Katie, it became clear that I was at the wrong spot. She didn't know how to get to the hotel from where I was and suggested that I take a cab, but I wanted to try to get there on my own. I got an English map of the streetcar system in the hotel lobby and figured out there were three lines that would take me from Hiroshima Station to the Hiroshima Bus Center, which was a short walk to the hotel. I found sings to direct me to the streetcar which was on the other side of the station. I found my line, and the conductor (who spoke good English) confirmed that it would take me to the Bus Center. Using my map, I even figured out that I needed stop M9 (the rest of the stop name was in Japanese), but the conductor also signaled to me when it was my stop and announced it in English (all other stops were announced in Japanese only). Luckily for me, I had bought a snack at the Tokyo airport and gotten change from my 2000 yen (~$20) bill. This gave me the small change I needed to use the payphone and pay my streetcar fare (150 yen, but I only had 200).

After getting off the streetcar, I recognized where I was from Google's satellite view. Before leaving the US, I had loaded up our GPS with maps and points of interest for our trip. Katie had the GPS, but I remembered the route from the bus center to the hotel about 5 blocks away. I also had a paper map as a backup, but I started walking the way that I remembered. Sure enough, I found the hotel, along with a very tired and worried (and still jet-lagged) Katie. She was surprised to see me walk in rather than take a cab. We figured out how we (I) went wrong, then went up to our room.

I was so pumped from my adventure that I was tired but too excited to sleep right away. I was hungry, too, but Katie had saved me some leftovers, which was awesome. Then we compared notes about our flights in and our experiences getting around Japan. In retrospect, we probably should have just planned to meet at the hotel, although I'm not sure I would have been able to figure out my mistake without calling Katie or having a GPS. And I'm glad we brought the GPS. As expected, all street signs are in Japanese, so figuring out where you are on a map labeled in English (like those in our guide books) is almost impossible.

Anyway, in the end I made it, and with a little extra adventure for good measure. Now I just have to get over this jet-lag, and and I will be good to go for our Japan adventure. So much to see and do!

While I was busy traveling, Katie had some free time after the conference and visited Miyajima, a town on an island just off the coast from Hiroshima. Here are a few of the photos she took.