Shinsaikaibashi Bridge

Chris and his boat pulled out to sea sea sea to see what they could see see see…so I was left to my own devices for entertainment. I learned this: the Japanese bus system is scary as heck. Trains are mostly marked in English and all you need is a train pass, which deducts each ticket from your balance without having to figure out your fare and purchase each trip separately. Buses on the other hand are a totally different story. Nothing is in English. The schedules are written in some kind of code. It doesn’t pull into a station or anything, so you never quite know where you are. So to get to this bridge, I’d asked for a bus schedule from the information booth when I got to Sasebo, but it was different from the schedule in use at the bus station. Then, the buses just pull in and leave really quickly, so I missed the first one going my direction. Once I got on the correct bus I had no idea when to get off! A board at the front of the bus lists fares according to entrance point. So when the fare that the bus station lady helped me prepay came up, I knew I was close.
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“Saikaibashi koko desu ka? koko desu?” I asked the bus driver. This may mean: “Where is Saikai bridge? Is it here?” or maybe not. That’s what I meant to say anyway. The driver shook his head no and pointed ahead, so I sat down. At the next stop I poked my head around the partition again and he nodded and gestured where to go. Then I got off and stood next to a cryptic bus stop schedule on a busy road in the middle of nowhere 55 minutes from a bus station and wondered if I’d ever see my hotel room again. Well, if not the hotel, at least the bridge, right? Sure enough, Saikaibashi Koen, a pretty park between two famous-ish bridges, was ahead on my right. Tons of sakura, or cherry blossoms, had started to bud and looked like they’d burst into bloom in a week or two. This place will be gorgeous! After wandering, I found a hotel and asked them where the bus to Sasebo Station was. Miraculously—and I mean that in the most true form of the word—a bus to Sasebo Station was leaving from right in front of the hotel within 10 minutes. The buses don’t run very frequently, so if I’d missed that one, I think there was only one more bus all afternoon. Yikes!!

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After some lunch I decided to test my luck with another where-the-heck-am-I adventure. I took a train a little way north to try to find some caves and rocks prominently featured on the City of Sasebo’s website. My map of the area (which I got from the same info booth that gave me the not helpful bus schedule) had two of the train stations switched. I got off at the one with the wrong name because I was counting how many stops I needed to go; the station names weren’t always in English on this train. When I saw the station name on the platform I panicked a little, but studied my map and decided I was probably in the correct area and the map was wrong. This was in fact the case and I soon found a street sign for the caves. After the caves and an old castle ruin site, I wandered for a long time looking for the rocks, which the map had incorrectly placed on the wrong side of the road. I also found an enormous temple that wasn’t even on the map. What the heck. I couldn’t find the train stations I was looking for, so eventually I gave up and walked all the way back to the station I came over on, squinted at the train schedule until I thought it made sense, guessed at my fare, and beat Chris to the cafe where we were meeting up before dinner. Chris and I commenced our evening with Chinese food and continued it with karaoke (where a Japanese girl rocked out to “Hey hey you you I wanna be your girlfriend” and it was almost as fantastic as Chris singing J. Hendrix) before going to listen to a Japanese band play American songs.