The morning began with the familiar pain that I’ve – for better or for worse – started getting used to, followed by the usual procrastination – something I wish wasn’t as familiar as it is.

The day’s agenda was to go to the zoo for a second round with Jess and a few other people she had invited. Due to a pub crawl the night prior, we decided to meet up at 14:00 instead of 11:30. I also intended on going out to Roppongi (六本木) with my friend, Brendan, at a later point in the day.

Procrastination went on until about 13:00. That’s when I decided to go and take a shower and start moving towards the station. Pretty much right after getting out of the shower and having gotten clothed, I went out to walk towards the Ueno station (上野駅)… that is until I noticed that I was missing my wallet and my passport. I quickly returned to the hostel to pick those up and got back to walking towards the station.

On my way there, I remembered that I actually hadn’t had any breakfast, so I stopped by a place where I expected to get a quick burger to get the hunger out of the way – it took me fifteen minutes to get the burger and it tasted of disappointment. I continued onwards.

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I woke up just to remember that I was still at the Tokyu, still stuck with the awful connection. Annoyed, I went ahead and procrastinated for a while. Before leaving, I tried to do some research on the routes that would be going from the Niigata station (新潟駅) to the Tokyo station (東京駅) and eventually to the Osaka station (大阪駅), but the connection was so utterly crap that it wouldn’t even load Google Maps – GOOGLE MAPS! Pretty pissed off, I walked out of the hotel and headed for the station.

At the station I checked out the connections, and thankfully found the trains I would need to take to get to Osaka (大阪). I boarded the MAX Toki train heading for Tokyo (東京) and began passing out again. When in Tokyo (東京), I switched to a Kodama and continued on to the Shin-Osaka station (新大阪駅). I eventually arrived at Shin-Osaka (新大阪), went to the Osaka terminal (大阪駅) and after that started to find a way to get in to the Osaka Castle Park (大阪城公園).

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I was horrified to notice that the clock was 9:30 already when I woke up; I clearly wouldn’t have the time to take a visit to the castle site if I wanted to reach the Youtube Hanami Party. So I got my stuff, checked out and rushed to the station to get to a shinkansen headed for Tokyo (東京).

Oh yeah, I still couldn’t figure out the toilet.

The train ride lasted for hours. I slept most of the way through, and whenever I was awake, I was looking at the great views and trying to think how I was going to actually get to Yoyogi Park (代々木公園) – the place the party was taking place in. At the end of the ride I had my plan ready and departed for the Yamanote line (山手線).

The train to Shibuya (渋谷) was crowded, but nowhere near as crowded as a lot of people would let you believe. Then again, it wasn’t rush hour when I got there. I eventually reached the station in Shibuya (渋谷) and started walking towards my destination.

I walked in the massive crowds and noticed that the data signal had gotten absolutely dreadful – it kept disconnecting every few seconds after it finally found a signal. After some time of walking, I got to the park entrance, passing the NHK studio park.

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