By Lydia
At the end of my year as an exchange student in Japan, my mother joined me so we could cavort around the country for three weeks. For the most part we had a very wonderful and memorable time.
The biggest downfall to our travels, however, was that we did it all in the last two weeks of January, and the first week of February, which makes most of the country extremely cold.
Our first destination was the city of Kanazawa, in Ishikawaken. The city I had lived in was in Fukushimaken, so my mother and I had to take the shinkansen down to Tokyo (a city which I've been in quite a few times, and don't really like) and then back up north, then further north, and then west along the coast. Tokyo hadn't seemed to see much snow, but further north where I was living there were feet and feet of it.
As our shinkansen moved further north, the snow began to fall. We relaxed, happy to know that the train ride would only last a few hours.
The train stopped somewhere in Toyamaken or Niigata. We were uncertain why this happened, but bore with it. A little delay was nothing to whine about, after all.
After at least 30 minutes, the train oozed along, then stopped, then oozed along again. Snow was whirling everywhere, and we listened to what they were saying on the intercom, but I guess even after a year in Japan I didn't know the word for "blizzard".
We reached a station, one of many, and there we stayed for several hours. Most of the passengers in our car had, after that wait, left at that very station, but my mother and I couldn't get off because we had no other way of getting to Kanazawa. We didn't even know how far it was from where we were stopped. We could see human life, and workers with bright orange jackets milling about, but the station was very small. My mother and I read the kanji of a sign pinned up to part of the building, and "fish" was the only one we knew. After sitting there for quite some time, my mother told me it probably said "Frozen Fish Village" and we had a hearty laugh.
Eventually, people at the station handed a small juice box and sweet bread to each passenger, and when the box was held before me I looked in it, grimaced, and looked at my mother, who didn't look too happy, either. The last thing we needed was sugar... our blood sugars were always out of whack, and we needed protein, not fluff! We took the stuff anyway, and consumed them. It was a very nice gesture by the people, but still disappointing. But what was I complaining for?
Eventually we moved on. A little bit. At one point we were stuck on a bridge for more than an hour. By nightfall, we had reached a vast wasteland of swirling white. In the far distance...at least a mile or more from my window, I could see a a few bright lights, and somehow assumed it was a hotel or something of the sort....but there were no other visible lights. By that time, my mother and I were even too tired to talk, much less play hangman, which we had done for the first few hours of being immobile, each word or phrase becoming more and more dire, from things like "Frozen Fish Village" to "Intestinal parasites" , and eventually, "We're screwed."
So, I managed to fall asleep (although I do pride myself in being able to fall asleep anytime, anywhere). The horror of this part in my experience was that I woke up several times, and each time I would look out my window excitedly to see where we were this time, only to see the same bright lights in the distance. I cannot even explain how devasting that felt. I don't mean to be complaining- compared to some things, this experience is candy, but maybe you just had to be there.
We were stuck in that dark wasteland for at least five hours. My memory says six, but I cannot remember for certain.
At long last, the train inched along. Yet it stopped again. It was around 2 a.m. by that point, and when my mother and I felt the train stop again, we cracked. I got up from my seat and moved the few rows to the seats on one side of the very back row, which I then laid across. My feet were up against the glass of the window, and my head tipped over the armrest and into the aisle, staring at the ceiling. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, which I did for a short time. At one point some of the "train people" walked by, but they never said anything. If I was breaking any rules, they probably (and thankfully) just let it rest because of the predicament we were all in.
We were scheduled to arrive in Kanazawa at 4:10 in the afternoon, but we arrived there after 3 in the morning. Just before the ride on the Doom Train, we had been travelling for another two hours, so all in all we had been on trains for more than thirteen hours that day. And it's one thing to be stuck thirteen hours on an airplane, and another entirely to be stuck on a train. Because, you see, at least the plane is (usually) going somewhere.
Most people still on the train got refunds, but my mother and I just wanted to get to our hotel and sleep. Because trains don't run that early in the morning, ours was the only one at the station, which made it easy to find our way about. We soon figured out where the taxi stop was, and went outside. Everyone else seemed to have arrived there before us, and we were last in line.
The wind was so strong it pushed and pushed, and I was seriously wondering at some points if it would knock me over. It looked like a hurricane, only snow was flying sideways, and you could hardly breathe. Being born and raised in a place that doesn't get much snow ever, this was very uncomfortable for me.
We stood in line with the rest of them for a good fifteen minutes, when at long last a car turned into the lot and pulled up to the curb. I blinked after a momen,then turned to my mother and said, "One." This made her and a young man standing in front of us burst out laughing. But, after a few minutes, another one came, and after a few more a whole convoy had arrived, much to our relief. The man in line in front of us kindly let us in before him.
I guess the moral of this story is: don't travel in Japan in the winter and expect to get to where you're going. In fact, the experience was so frustratingly awful that I have forgotten most of the details of the entire trip, until a week later when we finally arrived in the beautiful and snow-free Kyoto.
