We almost had a panic attack last night. Because Kyoto is such a popular tourist destination, we had to split our stay between two different apartments. Although I printed out our lodging information before we left for Japan, more detailed instructions arrived later … when I no longer had access to a printer. (NOTE: this story occurred before we had cell phones with built-in data access).
As we hopped in a taxi yesterday to go to the second lodging, I realized that my printed-out instructions had no precise address, just an approximate arrow on a map. There were walking instructions from the train station, but no street names — just directions such as “walk 100 meters and turn right at the beauty salon.” The more precise instructions were in my email archives, but I no longer had access to wifi. We were trying to communicate with a taxi driver who spoke no English and we spoke no usable Japanese. I pointed to the phone number given to us, but the taxi driver kept telling us that was not a good phone number. I still don’t know why.
When we got to the general location, I tried to use the walking instructions to find our house, but it wasn’t working. We finally told the taxi driver to drop us off and we’d figure it out. We were in a Japanese neighborhood where the street signs have only Japanese characters, no restaurants with friendly wifi. It didn’t look like any help was forthcoming, and we were weighted down with our luggage.
Using the walking instructions, we backtracked to the only recognizable landmark and tried again. We turned on an unlikely-looking street, but it was actually taking us in the right direction. I prayed that a beauty salon would appear after approximately 100 meters. It did. We finally found our way to our traditional Japanese house with tatami mats and futons. We’re grateful that we didn’t have to hike back to Kyoto Station to try and access wifi.
July 26, 2014