Day 3 - Tokyo First Day - Fri, Jun 27
First Impressions
There are a lot of bikes. Nothing like my last trip to Saigon, but much more than I was expecting for such a busy city. And none of them are locked up. Theft is so high back home I even worry about my bike on a quick trip into the grocery store when it is locked.
There are vending machines everywhere!
Achievements
- Note to self. Don’t trust where you are based on GPS. It frequently loses signal. The announcements are in English but the station names are Japanese and stop numbers, so do yourself a favor and remember the stop numbers.
- Not all trains make all stops. I haven’t quite figured that one out yet. But google maps works pretty good to show train times and connections (when you aren’t underground).
- Everybody needs their own IC (transit) card. I thought they were like bus tickets back home so added way too much money to the first card I bought.
Grocery shopping in Japan. Google translate is your friend. Just hold your camera in front of an item and it converts everything to English.
Challenges
- No meat is allowed to be imported. Even if you have a sandwich with processed meat on it, it will get confiscated. Ugh. So all of our lunches got taken away. Perhaps you could sneak it out but I wouldn’t want to risk it.
- Someone lost their fully loaded Sucia card on the first train trip before evening getting a chance to charge for the trip. Grrr.. You need to tap at the start of your trip, and then you get charged when you leave depending on how far you went. Since the card was lost we need to pay a fine to escape the subway.
One of the luggage handles completely fell apart.
- I found out just how heavy our luggage is after carrying them up and down many flights of stairs. Not all the train stops exits are elevator/escalator friendly.
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