Lost & Found, and more last minute departures

A member of the Japanigans team lost quite a few valuables on this trip, but managed to get them all back.

On our first day, this person lost 3500 CAD in cash at the airport. We were at the SoftBank counter on the fourth floor and our friend left a stack of cash inside a plastic bag on the counter. We simply went downstairs to the NTT Docomo counter without a clue. Within five minutes, the SoftBank lady that we spoke to upstairs approached us. She asked us if we had forgotten anything. A quick check on our pockets revealed that indeed, we were missing a lot of cash. She returned our cash and didn’t even take a small reward we were offering her.

On the second last day of our trip, this same person lost about three thousand dollars worth of camera equipment. We were on the subway, going back to our hotel, with our hands full of items we had bought. Halfway to the train station, our friend remembered that he left his backpack on the subway. We all thought that we would never see the bag and its contents again.

We spoke to a local subway attendant, and he told us to fill out a form. Our friend then described his bag and the contents inside it. The timing couldn’t have been worse, as we were leaving to the airport the next day.

The morning on the day of our departure, we got a phone call at our hotel room, exactly at 9 AM. It was the subway workers, notifying us that the bag had been found. The timing couldn’t have been better.

Immediately, we rushed to the station where our bag was held. We had 90 minutes to pick up the bag and return to our hotel, since the airport shuttle bus was leaving at 12:55 PM. There was no way we could take the next shuttle, because we would be missing our flight for sure. To make matters worse, we didn’t have our bags packed, and we also had the matter of checking out.

Luckily for us, we made it back barely on time. We literally had five minutes to pack our bags in our room. The hotel staff was kind enough to let a few minutes slide. While Fallout was checking out, the staff took our bags and placed it on the shuttle. We are quite possibly the luckiest fools on the planet.

To finish off this post, we would like to say that the Japanese have some seriously strong ethics that we have never witnessed anywhere else in the world. If this were Montreal, we would be kissing our money goodbye. The locals here seem to frown upon stealing, and they always look out for one another. We only wish we had this kind of ethics back home.