Train train, don’t fuck me over! Train train, you can burn in hell.

When we last left Jeff, he was drinking Friday night away with his teachers and biking back drunk.

So, what did I do on Saturday morning? Why, get up at 4:30 in the morning to hike, of course! Daniel organizes a hike every month or so for Gunma JETs, and Cindy, Sean and I decided to join the others in order to do something different and do something ACTIVE, for once. Little did we know just how active we would be!

I got up ridiculously early to shower the second-hand smoke off of me, then catch the 5:47 train from Yabu to meet up with everyone in Maebashi. I was somehow surprisingly awake and not hungover, which I think is because I had been mentally preparing myself all week long for the awful morning. Oy, that is such a ridiculous hour to wake up!

Anyway, from Maebashi, we broke up into cars and drove to somewhere in Kanagawa (where I studied abroad), then took a couple of buses to the mountain. It took like five hours or something to get there?! Eek! After all of that sitting, I was very ready to start hiking.

The hike was hard in a good way….more work than Sean, Cindy and I expected (just a bit more steep than the usual hiking we do around AEON!), but a good amount of burning-the-winter-fat-off exercise. It took two hours to get to the top, where there was a beautiful view of the surrounding area, including the OCEAN (I miss the ocean! Stupid land-locked Gunma). It was pretty, but hella windy up there, so we hid in a covered area and ate our lunches. I fear that I may have actually gained weight from the hike, as I ate like four cups of rice that day, as well as who knows what else. I also ate all day long Sunday out of pure starvation. Hrm.

Anyway, the way down was just as much work as the way up, as it was steep, and really muddy. I surprisingly didn’t eat shit, though there were many close calls! Eventually we got down to the bottom and found a BEAUTIFUL area full of cherry blossoms and plum trees. They were soooo purty.

From there we had to go to the eki to take the train back to cars….us lazy peeps were not amused to find that the eki was 25 minutes away and uphill! Oy!

Once we got to the eki, the train drama started. We realized the best way for us Ota/Tatebayashi people to get home on time would be to take trains the whole way home. So we looked up the train changes on our keitais (how did anyone ever get around Tokyo before keitais?) and relaxed in the meantime. About 45 minutes into our train ride, we were in the middle of an intense game of let’s-entertain-ourselves-on-the-train charades (it also entertained some old people around us, who seemed to be trying to figure out our gestures, as well). All of a sudden, the train stops and EVERYONE gets off. It takes us a minute to realize this is probably not a good sign. The eki guy comes in to clear the train, and we are like “Wait….does this train go to Kuki?” It was most definitely a bad sign that the eki guy didn’t even KNOW where Kuki is!!! After panicking greatly, we realized we somehow took the wrong train for about 25 minutes (I still don’t know how it happened). It being hours away from the last train, one would assume it would be all right. Or NOT. There was one route we could take that would get us on the last train to Ota (not even our own stops, but Ota), and many routes we could take that would get us there at 7 in the fucking morning the next day!!!!! So Cindy, Sean and I decided to ganbaru to the max and take the route, despite its impossibly short amount of time to switch between trains, subways, and other train lines. What followed is impossible to even give justice in words, but I will try.

At one stop we were about to get on a train that was leaving within 30 seconds, when I asked an old man if it was going to where we wanted. When he said no and pointed to a train on another track (with many stairs in between), the three of us SCREAMED and ran faster than humanly possible to get on the train before it left. Then at the next stop we had five minutes to run off the train, go down many stairs to the subway track, pay our leftover fare from the train, buy tickets for the subway, then go down more stairs to get ON the subway. This involved throwing our tickets and a random amount of money at the eki guy (while yelling “Sorry, sorry, last train, no time, sorry!” in Japanese to him). Then when the subway arrived in Asakusa, we had 9 minutes to walk 550 meters (3/4 of which is going up stairs, and includes two crosswalks that never agree with pedestrians) to the Tobu eki where we had to buy tickets before going up stairs to get on a train. Not only did we somehow do this, but we made it in FOUR MINUTES. Is that even humanly possible?! It was like the eki Olympics! I have literally never ran so fast in my life! I refused to stay in Tokyo for the night, and Sean and Cindy felt the same.

So, in the end, we made it, and none of us even peed our pants on the 2-hour train ride home (a feat in itself, considering how much water we had). We got into Ota at 11:50, then got rides home (thanks, Nacchan!). I then slept so well that I am guessing the entire apartment complex heard me snore.

Lesson from the hike: stay in Gunma when hiking! Not as many trains involved!

Second lesson of the day: Cindy and I are NEVER climbing Fuji in September, as we had planned. 2 hours has me sore enough, let alone 7+ hours. Um, yeah.