Cheezies, cars, trains

June 6, 2013

This morning we got up at around 6:30am to finish packing our bags and get ready to leave our apartment as Derrick was picking us up at 7:30am. However Derrick ended up being late as there was an accident, so he didn’t get to our place until around 8:30am. While we were waiting I sent Ben on an errand to 7-11 to pick us up something to eat so we wouldn’t have to stop on our way to the car auction. The drive to the USS Tokyo auction took about an hour and Ben drove so Derrick could catch up on some emails on the way. To his great embarrassment, on his first right turn Ben ended up in the wrong lane with a bus heading right towards us. He also turned on the windshield wipers rather than the turn signal more than once, such a rookie mistake. He also took a wrong turn and blamed it on the GPS lady.

Once we got to the auction, we spent literally the entire day walking around an enormous parking lot filled with over 11,000 cars that were being auction off today. Of course we looked at all of Ben’s favorite JDM cars, some cars that Derrick was bidding on for his other customers, and we looked at Mini’s for me. 

Derrick ended up bidding on 4 different cars for us: 2 Mini’s, a Toyota Hilux Surf, and a Skyline, but we didn’t win any of them. Hours later as I write this, Ben is still bemoaning the fact that he was narrowly outbid on the Hilux; it was news to me that he even wanted on since we had one last year for so long and he likes to drive lots of different cars, but apparently he needs one for 4x4-ing this summer. We also saw a super crazy jacked-up Land Cruiser Prato, it was even bigger than Ben thought it would be and to me seemed a little impractical for an every-day driver.

After walking around looking at cars until about noon, we went in to the auction building to watch the live bidding. Everything is done on monitors and there are 10 cars being auctioned off at any one time. Depending on how many (or how few) people are bidding on a vehicle, a car is auctioned off in a matter of seconds.

 For example, we put in a bid on a super sweet green Mini and I filmed the auction, which lasted all of 10 seconds. The whole thing was pretty nuts, but I found that watching the screens was really exhausting and made me want to sit down and close my eyes.

No time for resting though because the guys wanted to go back out and look at more cars and check out the campers up for auction as well as the flat deck car carrier trucks that Ben wants.

 Of course these were at the farthest end of the car lot. After watching the guys unsuccessfully try to figure out how to make the truck bed lower to the ground, we finally headed back to the auction building for a late lunch of Japanese curry and ice cream. After we finished our lunch, we took the “we didn’t buy any cars today” walk of shame back to the car. By this time is was around 3:30-4:00pm and according to Derrick’s GPS it would take 1 hour and 34 minutes to take the non-toll roads back to the Yokohama train station; Derrick lives in Yokohama so we figured it would be easier to head straight there so he was closer to home after he dropped us off. In actuality, it took us over 3.5 hours to get to the Yokohama train station. Ben was whining like a baby because his seat was uncomfortable; personally I thought the seats in the car were fine.

Finally we got to the train station at 7:15pm and we went to the JR info booth to find out which train to take to Nagoya. The lady gave us our reserved seating tickets and sent us to track 3 to catch our train at 7:52pm. So at about 7:46pm a train pulls up to the station and we get on figuring the train will be here for a couple minutes as people get on and off; we get on the right car and head towards our seat, but there are people sitting there already and the train has already left the station. Ben immediately says that he knew we were getting on the wrong train (which we did, but the real question is why did he follow me so blindly if he knew I was wrong?). Anyways, obviously at this point we are committed to the train, so we moved to the next car and loitered by the doors until a train staff member came by. She told us that we were still on a train to Nagoya, but instead of arriving at 9:19pm we would arrive at 10:16pm because this train makes many more stops along the way. The lame part is that since it’s nighttime we can’t even enjoy the scenery, so instead I’m writing. I feel really bad since Jen is meeting us at the train station and now she has to stay up even later than we thought and she still has to work tomorrow.

As we were driving around today, we noticed that Denny’s Restaurant is pretty popular here, they are literally everywhere. Apparently the food is even worse than Denny’s at home and it’s more expensive. There are also a lot of KFC’s and they pretty much all have a little statue of the Colonel standing at the door to welcome you. We say yesterday that the Subway here makes a shrimp and avocado sandwich so we are definitely trying that before the end of our trip. According to Ben, you gotta try all the regional offerings from the fast food chains, you can eat Japanese food at home but you what you can’t eat? Japanese McDonald’s and Subway food only offered in Japan.

We arrived in Nagoya right on time at 10:16pm (well on time for the train we were on, 1 hour late from when we thought we would arrive). Jen and Naoya were waiting for us at the train station and of course were excited to see us. I thought that they would be tired and would want to go home since they have to work on Friday, but they were all pumped up to go out and do something. We were pretty tired though and wanted to drop off our bags, so we just ended up going back to their apartment and hanging out for a bit before going to bed. I presented Jen with her gift from home: a Costco size bag of Hawkins Cheezies.

 To say she was excited would be an understatement. She cracked into them right away. The big bag was full of small snack sized bags, so she dumped out the big bag and started counting them and deciding how she would ration them to make them last as long as possible. It was pretty funny and pretty much exactly what I figured she would do.