Astute eyes may have noticed that I had visited two important temples in Tokyo in my first two weeks in Japan, but that I had only visited one of them, Enoshima Shrine, again to collect its goshuin since I made my return to Tokyo. This was because I wanted the other shrine, Sensoji, or Asakusa Kannon Temple, to be the last place I visited in Tokyo. In addition, Asakusa was located very close to Minowa where I was living, so I planned to just walk there after I checked out of the hotel, since I was due to out at 10:00 am but wouldn’t be flying out of Tokyo until 6:30 pm.

In an effort to minimize post-plane jet lag, I stayed up for most of the night on my last night in Tokyo, and then checked out right on time in the morning, leaving my 10th and last postcard with my room key at the front desk before leaving the hotel. I didn’t meet any of the staff on the way out, which was fine, as I had been annoyed by several things in the hotel room anyway, like how the drain had been clogged up for the last couple days of my stay there and wasn’t draining water properly, or how the dryer really wasn’t very good (until I figured out that I was supposed to hang up my damp clothes in the washroom underneath the heater there to dry them there). I still did like the stay, but I eventually left some notes on all these little issues I had found in their public review instead.

Anyway, dragging my bags along with me, I checked the map and headed south. Google said the temple was about a 20 minute walk away — even with my heavy bags, it still only took me a little over 25 minutes, not bad at all. The direction I approached from took me into the temple from the back side of it, but serendipitously enough, the building housing the priests that were drawing the temple seals was also located back around there, so that’s where I headed first to pick up my loot.

I joined a line, paid 500 yen to the shrine maiden in charge of the reception counter (this was more expensive than most temples, which charged 300 yen for theirs), and waited around until my goshuin was done.

I then walked back toward the front of the temple and into the main hall. I didn’t offer a coin this time — I already donated last time I was here and I consider that 500 yen for the seal a donation too, but I ogled at the sheer number of people that were here.

There were lots of students as well, and I realized that the fact that it was Friday probably paid a part in that. Here there’s a crowd of yellow-hat elementary school students in the background, and some high school students in the foreground:

And some yellow hat students in the foreground.

And a woman walking five dogs:

There really were all types of visitors. There were also tour groups coming into the place, I followed a group of them out to near Asakusa Station, where I was going to take the train system to the airport. There, the group joined up with three or four other groups of equal size as they waited for and climbed aboard tour buses to bring them to the next tourist hotspot.

Definitely not my style of travelling at all, but whatever works for them!

There were several routes to the airport from here, but I specifically wanted to use the Narita Express line, since that line was covered by my JR Pass, which today was the last day of. I took the Tokyo Metro Ginza Line, the sister line to the Hibiya Line that I had been taking these last few days, from Asakusa Station to Kanda Station. This was the last train ride I had to pay for. I then took the JR Rapid Chuo Line from Kanda Station to Tokyo Station. From there, I found out that just like the shinkansen, I needed to “buy” a special ticket to use the train. It was free just like the other tickets thanks to the pass, but the ticket was outside the gate, and the actual platform for the Narita Express in Tokyo Station was located some distance away from the regular gates, so it took me a while to waddle my way over there. I had missed the last train so I settled in to wait for the next one, and noticed something interesting.

It seemed like this Narita Express train, similarly to the Sunrise Izumo and Seto that I had taken from Okayama back on the evening of Day 30, was actually two separate trains that was going to be joined into one here in Tokyo Station. Cool! I certainly had no idea and wasn’t planning for this so it was neat to see this coupling happen a second time, although this one was a lot quicker and didn’t involve opening any intermediate doors as far as I could see. There was also a small group of interested bystanders watching this conjoining process, which was all automatic, though I have no idea if there was a passage that opened between the two newly-adjacent carriages afterwards so that people could walk between them from within the train. I had hurried off to my carriage by then so that the train wouldn’t leave without me.

I had a window seat in a double-seater chair near the front of the my carriage, and although there were plenty of double empty seats around, there was another guy who had booked the seat next to me too, probably because the seat in front of us was a single seater for whatever reason, so he had extra room to stretch out his legs. But who books a seat next to someone else instead of just booking your own empty seat so that everyone has more space for themslves?

I used the selfie reverse camera function on my phone to snap this picture of empty seats on the train, which had the effect of mirroring and reversing the following picture from left to right.

The view out the window was actually pretty good as the train chugged on from Tokyo Station toward Chiba Station, and then to Narita Airport.

But I largely just muttered dark thoughts at my seat companion under my breath, as I was forced to put one bag in the compartment above my seat thanks to his presence here, and then took a nap for most of the ride to the airport.

Once I was at the airport, I was slightly afraid that they would not allow me to check in that early because there were still about six hours to go before my plane left. But the Japan Airlines desk had no problem with that. In addition, I couldn’t actually check-in online, nor at one of these fancy self-check-in kiosks:

They all just said to go to the JAL desk to manually check in instead. The woman who tried to check me in needed some sort of help from a senior manager of some kind to do so, and was also very confused in trying to explain things to me because she kept on alternating between English and Japanese, as though not sure if I were a foreigner or not (despite my passport and name on it), but eventually did manage to print my boarding tickets and give them to me. I asked if she knew what my issue with self-check-in was, and she said she thought it had something to do with potentially needing to print out baggage tags, even though I had no luggage that I was going to check in. I don’t fully know how it works but I had suspected that it was something to do with how my original booking might have checked me in for both ends of the roundtrip flight already, since I had already done my seat and meal selection for my return flights while still in Edmonton over a month ago, a few days before coming to Japan in the first place.

I passed baggage check and customs with my three bags, although a woman at the Japanese baggage check counter confiscated a small bottle of insect repellent that I had brought along with me, even though it had made it all the way here through baggage check just fine. The reason they confiscated it was that the bottle capacity was 110 ml, even though it was already partially used. The bottle was past its expiry date anyway, and I had ended up not using it the entire trip at all, so thanks for getting rid of it for me, I guess? Overzealous border guards need to find something better to do with their miserable lives though. Although I did like that Japan’s banned items list included some Japanese specific items that one wouldn’t see at any other country’s airport, like “box meal with self heating devices”.

Furthermore, after checking in, I looked at my phone app and realized that for some terrible reason, the two airport lounges that I had access to using my Passport Visa Infinite credit card were both on the OTHER side of the security gates, outside and prior to customs and baggage check. Why would lounges be built out there instead of inside the departure area? What kind of traveller visits a lounge before checking in? What kind of weird layout does Narita Airport have? There was one single lounge inside the departure area as well, but that one wasn’t one that I was qualified for using my card, which was ridiculous. Apparently my Visa card gave me access to a free lunch at a particular restaurant inside the departure area as well, but I never did find this store, so it was probably in the domestic departures area or something, and with how many shops were still shuttered I wouldn’t have been surprised if it were still closed anyway.

Narita Airport sure had nice windows though. I found a lounge chair in the departure section with a power cord next to it, and settled down there for 4 hours to type away on my laptop with a great view in front of me. That did a lot to mollify me. I finished my Day 31 post while watching ground crews working on random planes there, and was happy that I ended the trip only 4 days behind on my blog-writing.

I also bought a box of shiroi koibito cookies from this duty-free store in the post-check-in area in the airport, as I knew that my mom had mentioned wanting some of these. I had also eaten them in the past when they were on sale in an Asian supermarket in Edmonton, and they were really nice, but they were a Hokkaido specialty, and I had not gone all the way up there this trip, so I had not actually thought of buying them up until I saw it in the airport store. I knew that airport prices were probably a little bit marked up, but I felt that the price was still reasonable.

And lastly, here was the last vending machine that I saw in Japan on this trip, located in the gate waiting area for our flight.

Soon enough, my plane arrived, and away into the sky I went!