Next on our agenda was to make it to the Seibu Dome to watch the Seibu Lions baseball team in Tokorozawa play against the Yakult Swallows... seems easy enough except we had to take the subway to get there, Tokorozawa is about an hour outside of Central Tokyo, we had never even been into a subway station in Tokyo, and we had to pass through one of Tokyo's busiest stations to get there... this was a very stressful experience...
This was the very first subway attempt I had ever made and the only subway station Syl had been in before this was in London in 1984...
we got lost quite a few times - if it wasn't for some very patient Japanese subway workers we wouldn't have made it... after realizing we didn't understand him and he didn't understand us - one guy left his position and walked us all the way through the station and pointed us in the right direction...
if you do not understand the basics of the subway here - this can be a very frightening experience... about every 2 minutes a loud ringing goes off and everyone in the station starts running... we still haven't figured out what the ringing is for or what everyone is in a rush to get to...
on the final leg of our trip to Seibu Dome we needed to find one more subway line, but we couldn't find it... in my best Japanese I asked a lady at an information booth and she pointed at a subway car... it was getting ready to leave so we didn't have time to think about it - we jumped on and hoped for the best... it was about another 30 minutes ride into the Dome and it took a while before we trusted we had the right line enough to sit down...
luckily the trip back wasn't as scary because we understood a little better how it worked...
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