Tokyo Bound

Wow! My iPod touch would not type into this blog window. Bummer! Anyways, I'm here in Tokyo. Arrived a few hours ago at the hotel.

The trip was very smooth and uneventful. And, that's a good thing. Although, my guts were bothering me all day as I'd not had much luck with them since the weekend. I think it's the stress of such a hectic few days of Jeju-Do and then some not so good food on Saturday. Plus, perhaps, the anxiety of not knowing quite what to expect when I got to Japan itself. Whatever! I'm ok now.

The plane was 20 minutes late in taking off, but, other than that, it was all good. A Boeing 777 to boot, too. So much smoother and nicer than Boeing 373's and the like. The food was good, too. And, I watched part of an English subtitled Korean disaster movie that was actually pretty good. I wish I saw it from the start, but did not know it was on till I was channel surfing later into the flight.

The trip from Narita International Airport into Tokyo was an hour on the high speed train and another 45 minutes on the subway after that. Not bad. I estimated 2 hours in total and I made it in 1 hour 45 minutes. Not bad. I bought the NEX and Suica ticket combo from JR available to foreign passport holders only. It's basically a train ticket into the city with an almost free subway e-card with a decent amount of usable money on it. It will most likely last me the entire week of daily usage, hopefully. A perk for the foreign traveler no doubt.

The high speed train into the city was quite interesting. The outskirts of Tokyo reminded me sooo much of North America it was not even funny. The houses, buildings, apartments, and stores all looked like they belonged back there and not here. Except for the clay tile style roofs on less than half of the buildings I saw, you would not be able to tell. That was a revelation. The area did not look "Asian" at all. Sorry, no pix. The train was moving too fast and the windows had this really bad peel and stick tint stuff stuck to them that was very poorly done. It degraded optical really badly.

I had also read on a few google searches that the subway ride after getting off the high speed train into the city to my hotel would be difficult. Hah! They obviously never used the Seoul subway system before. Piece of pie! Tokyo's subway system is easier to use than Seoul's by a long shot although a bit more complicated than Hong Kong's easy system. And, this being handicapped by the fact the map they gave me did not even have my stop listed on it. I guess they missed printing it. Good thing I remembered that there should be a stop at the empty space they had there on the map from my memory of where my stop is supposed to be based on looking at the subway system map the previous night on-line! Wow! That was a mouthful!

Above pix are of Incheon International Airport. It's a nice airport!