Tuesday, 25-11-2014. Day 97 (Part One).

Paper Chase.

We had two prime goals for the day — apply for our Chinese visas and get some tickets to Museum Ghibli. We only succeeded in one of them.

The Quest for China Visas

We'd been trying to get our visas for China since Bali. It was turning out to be challenging. Every time we tried to move forward, we ran into another roadblock. After our visit to the U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong, we still didn't have the kids’ birth certificates, but we thought we’d give a shot at getting the visas directly from the Chinese Embassy in Tokyo.

The application for a China visa is four pages long. Our apartment had no table, so we walked to a nearby cafe where we had a little breakfast and filled out four different four-page forms. It took quite a while (there are many questions), and when we were done I still wasn’t sure if they were filled out properly, but they’d have to do. So we packed up and headed off.

The Travel China Guide (which is a really good resource) gave the hours of the Chinese Embassy in Tokyo as 9:00 to Noon and 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. We’d already missed the early window, so our plan was to get there right when they re-opened up at 2:00 p.m., but first ...

Ghibli Museum Tickets — The Ordeal Continues

We had some time to burn before 2:00 p.m., and, since we were unable to get our Ghibli Museum tickets in Hong Kong, we looked into getting them in Japan. The easiest way to do this was to use the Loppi machines at Lawson stores.

We’d done our homework and found out how to buy the tickets from these machines. The good news here is that there's a Lawson on every other corner in Tokyo. So we picked one nearby, fired up the Loppi, and went through the steps.

But there were some subtle differences on the machine we were using compared to the diagrams we’d seen online. Primarily, it didn't like our credit cards, and if we didn’t pay by card, we were instead presented with a screen clearly meant to collect information, but we couldn’t read it at all.

We tried a few different Lawsons (thinking maybe the machines were different, but no) to no avail. And then Samantha noticed a little tab at the top of the screen with the word “Information” in English. We punched that and unlocked the secret English language menus.

We were in! Moments later, we had four tickets to the Ghibli Museum.

Feeling lucky, we headed off to the Chinese Embassy in the rain.

Chinese Embassy, Take One

When we arrived back at the Chinese Embassy, the doors were closed. And this is when we learned there were no afternoon hours; the embassy was only open from 9:00 to Noon. Stymied again. But at least we knew we could show up first thing the next morning and, hopefully, run these things home. Fortunately, our apartment was a short walk from the embassy.

As we tried to figure out what we wanted to do next, we noticed a small shop next to the embassy that offered visa application help. We thought it would be a good idea to see if they'd be willing to help us figure out if our forms were filled out properly.

We went in and showed the nice gent working there what we had. He looked over our paperwork and said it was “perfect.” Direct quote. He confirmed my suspicious that because of our unexpected Shanghai Interlude, we probably wouldn’t need to present the kids’ birth certificates (as they had been in China before) to get their visas. So as weird as that experience was, it was paying off.

He did advise us to make a copy the pages of our passports that had our 24-hour China visa stamp just to cover off, but other than that, we had everything. Even better, he didn't charge us. One trip to the Lawson next door to make some copies and we were feeling confident about our prospects of getting our Chineses visa the next day.

So there we were. On the streets of Tokyo with no plans. It had stopped raining, so we looked at our Tokyo wish list and after a little deliberation started a 30-minute walk over to Ra.a.g.f, the rabbit cafe.