Lost!

One downside to owning a bicycle is that I can get myself into a lot more trouble. On foot, even if I was very lost my wanderings could only take me a short distance before I eventually reoriented myself. On my bicycle, when I'm lost I can wind up very far away from anything familiar. Friday after work I attempted to bike home for the first time, and I was prepared to get at least slightly lost just due to the difficulties of navigating in Tokyo. Not only do I not have a detailed map of the area, (since my atlas only covers central Tokyo) there are also no street names. Since the cityscape is still very foreign to me, there are no significant landmarks that stand out in my mind. As a result, I have only two navigational tools available to me: 1) A vague sense of what direction I'm going. 2) An overview map that allows me to see at what "angles" the "major" streets intersect. So on Friday I was biking west on highway 50, and knew that at some point I needed to turn left. Apparently I chose the wrong point, because I quickly found myself in unfamiliar territory (even more unfamiliar than the territory I've already seen!) I decided that if I continued along my route, I would eventually run into some train tracks and be able to to reorient myself, so I wasn't too worried. However, after about 30 minutes I had passed a crop field, a horse stable, and a driving range but no tracks. At that point I decided to retrace my steps back to highway 50, but I had made enough turns along the way that I wasn't able. Now somewhat worried, I pulled into a 7-11, took out my map, and made full use of my extremely limited Japanese vocabulary to produce a respectable "sumimasen, watashi wa doko desu ka?" (excuse me, where am I?) I don't think that I was on the map. After some additional communication, which mostly consisted of me waving my arms around and saying the name of my train station, I established that I wanted to go to Sobudaimae. Then the 7-11 employee decided that, given our communication gap, the best course of action would be to give me a ride! We threw my bike in the back of his minivan, and drove to the station. It took about 30 minutes to go there (as I said, I was very lost), and there really wasn't much for us to stay to one another that would be comprehensible by the other party. After we arrived, I thanked him profusely and gave him a business card.