Thursday, April 13, 2017

Day 95: To Tokyo

Taking the shinkansen from Osaka to Tokyo was quite a process. The ticket machine I bought my tickets from didn't take cash, obviating the ¥20,000 I had withdrawn from an ATM just moments before, so I had to pay with card. The ticket (actually multiple slips of paper, some of them being receipts) it spits out is almost entirely in Japanese and I had to ask a man at the information desk what my track number was. Once I was on the train itself, I was kicked out of my seat after one stop because I had bought a non-reserved seat ticket, and although the carriage I had boarded lacked a "reserved" sign on the outside my ticket was only good for a seat in cars 1 through 3, according to the fare attendant I queried. But eventually I found my seat, and before I was kicked out I was able to get this video of our train leaving Osaka from a window seat!


Once in Tokyo I realized I had no internet connectivity and had not yet downloaded the offline map for Tokyo Ward, so all I had to go off of to find the capsule hotel I had booked were the instructions in the cached email. They told me to go to Asakusa Station, take exit A5, and walk left for a minute. After failing to find Asakusa station on the transit map, finding a similarly named Asakusabashi station instead, tapping onto the wrong line, transferring to the correct line after getting my previous tap on nullified by a fare attendant, getting off too early, and finding Asakusa Station on the line map while trying to reorient myself, I finally emerged from exit A5 and was able to find my accommodation squeezed between a salon and a restaurant.


Once settled in, I roamed the streets for food (not difficult to find, but there's so many choices!) before returning to sleep for the night.

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