After a 4-hour flight, I hit the shores of Japan with a vengeance. Armed with my rather limited Japanese (and of course some use of English as there are really some words or phrases that I really do not know how to pronounce in Japanese), I managed to get myself settled in nicely here in Tokyo. Finally the dream has come true!
The flight was actually not too bad. What I was most impressed about the whole flight was the meal:
It’s not that the food was very delicious (they normally aren’t for in-flight meals), but what I was impressed with was the food was actually being continuously heated up even when it was delivered. A small hot plate below the main course was the “culprit” for keeping the food warm – and that was really nice.
Arriving in the Narita Airport was, however, somewhat a chore because it wasn’t really convenient to be getting out from the plane to the arrival hall – I think it must have took me about half an hour if not more. Quite a bit of walk, then a shuttle, and then more walk, more queuing up, and then more waiting… not for one who’s in a rush. If there’s anything that I can take away from this whole ordeal was that I managed to really understand what all those people were saying Japanese, which include the immigration officer, the custom officer, the ticketing lady at the JR office… and for a short while I really thought my Japanese is all coming back!
I took the Narita Express which took me directly from the Airport to the Tokyo Main Station. The ticket price was 3500 yen which includes also a Suica card (similar to the Octopus in Hong Kong or the EZ-Link in Singapore). The train was really nice and comfy, and the most important thing was that it was fast (about one hour from the Airport to Tokyo) – definitely worth taking again.
After arriving in Tokyo, I changed onto the JR Yamanote Line to head to Akihabara, where I’ll put myself up for the night in the Capsule Inn Akihabara. However, finding this place was abou the toughest thing that I’ve done for all the time that I’m in Japan (albeit only for a few hours)! The place wasn’t the easiest to find, and even though its website said it would take only 4 minutes to walk from the Akihabara Station, I took more than an hour and had to ask about 10 people (out of whom 9 of them didn’t know where the place is either). In the end, I made a phonecall to the place and my limited Japanese definitely came to show here as I had to finally resort to English to make sure that the guy at the reception could understand me. But in the end I did manage to get there, and boy, how about that for an experience!
The view of my capsule – even for a big guy like me there’s still ample space!
The view from my capsule – as you can see, there was really quite a bit of space!
After settling into the Capsule Inn, I went to walk around Akihabara, which is famous for all the electronic goods. To be honest, I had quite a bit of walkabout around this area just now as I was finding the inn, and it’s really quite an amazing place. There are huge electornic goods stores with the prettiest mobile phones and what not. There are even huge stores that sell nothing but AVs (adult videos, for the uninitiated)! Of course I won’t give up the chance to check all these places out, but one funny thing though was that everwhere seems to be closed around 9pm, so there really wasn’t much to see. I guess Akihabara is only buzzing in the day, or perhaps I’m not sure where the buzzing place at night is?!
Would be heading to a few sightseeing places tomorrow, and hopefully they would be fun – and I’ll also move to a proper hotel tomorrow. One night of experience of a capsule inn is perhaps enough!
Random Ramblings of the Robotic Renegade 