Do You Want Some Sweet Tea?
Trip Start
Apr 22, 2008
1
19
26
Trip End
Sep 01, 2008
Tokyo,
Kanto,
Japan
Thursday, June 26, 2008
1. I needed to get the visa in Japan or I would not be able to get into Mozambique. Double complication: I already bought my tickets
2. I can't speak a lick of Japanese
3. I have never been to Tokyo
4. Katie, who lives in Tokyo,had to go to work on the "So excited, so excited, so scared" help line
5. Katie and I had not been able to navigate a single city on our trip without requiring 3 attempts to find anything
First mistake occurred when I assume the address of the embassy would resemble a street and a number which I could look up, find the cross streets, walk to and put my passport into someones hot little hands. WRONG. The address was written: MITA 3-2-17. Huh? Thats a little different than what I am used to. Since Katie was leading this excursion I decided to pay attention to shiny things I saw on the street, people sleeping in subways and the irony of seeing block after block of spotless streets without any public trash cans in view. I should have been paying more attention because Katie's map of the city led us to Yoyogi Uehara, the end of the subway line and the neighborhood where the Mozambique embassy was located....about a decade ago.
A bit of time was spent getting lost then retracing our steps to the subway and then Katie had to go to work. She left me to my own devices, with a map in hand, and wished me luck on my journey. Here is what I discovered about addresses in Tokyo: Mita 3-2-17
-Mita is the precinct within the city. Just like saying Soho, Kensington or Tribeca
-3 is the region within the precinct. A given precinct might have 5 to 7 regions within it
-2 is the number of the block within the region
-17 is the number of the building on the block
BRILLIANT!!! Its like an engineer developed the address system: Drive-Directory-Folder-File Name. So logical, and yet a little difficult seeing as how there aren't really any street names. How do you find the second block in the third region of the precinct? Anyways, with an atlas in hand and years of engineering education under my belt I found the building in no time. The Mozambique embassy was a small two story single family home down a side street in the middle of a residential neighborhood. Bizarre. Something seemed a little rotten in Denmark and I stood in the middle of the quiet alley looking, for lack of a better word, befuddled at the atlas Katie had given me. Mita 3-2-17. I was here. Had it moved again?
An old Japanese woman approached me and began speaking French. What in the? I knew the Tokyo Tower was a direct rip off of Mr. Eiffel's work, but this seemed odd. I responded in the broken French I picked up from ordering beers in Paris and watching Amelie one too many times and she immediately broke into perfect English. WHAT??? Turns out she is a teacher at a French American school, hence the language persuasion with which she was tickling my fancy. Also turns out I had found Mita 3-2-17. Also turns out this is definitely not where the embassy is located.
Feeling a little defeated by my failure but more than inspired by the city I was ready to put off finding the embassy until tomorrow. This little trilingual guardian angel would have no acceptance of failure and walked with me into shops asking store keepers if they knew where the embassy happened to be located. 2 tries, a Japanese atlas and 20 minutes later she walked me directly to the door of the building. I wanted to give her a hug, buy her a bouquet of flowers and a little cottage in the country. I couldn't' believe how nice she was and how much time she had spent helping a stranger. I also was incredibly embarrassed. We had made it to our final destination. Mita 3-12-17, NOT Mita 3-2-17. Katie's inability to read Japanese has morphed into her inability to read English and she wrote the address down incorrectly.
It was blind luck on my part that I was looking for the wrong address. Had I not been standing in the middle of the street looking like a lost "beige skinned round eye" I would not have had the chance to experience the overwhelming Japanese hospitality. I half expected her to offer me some sweet tea, biscuits and read me a bed time story before I went to sleep.
Check out my Tokyo Photos at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hewharris/sets/72157605901485015/
