arrival

we made it to tokyo! this is going to be a pretty short post, i havent taken many pictures yet.

we got through customs pretty quickly, and i was able to get a suica card. i was worried it would be difficult to get one, as last year there was a chip shortage that made it impossible to get one. i had an iphone last year and was able to use apple pay for a transit card, but this year i no longer have an iphone and the transit cards only support android phones sold in japan because of a sony licensing thing.

but thankfully, i was able to get one at the airport. so problem solved!

after arriving in the room and setting our bags down, we went out to dinner with our wonderful host shinobu-san. she took us to an amazing chinese restaurant less than a block away from our room.

the food was incredible, but we ordered way too much. we even got a photo with the family that runs the restaurant.

I also took a walk down the street to visit the first vending machine I went to last year, because it has one of the greatest beverages humanity has ever conceived, calpis soda.

thats mostly it for the first post. it is 8:08 AM on saturday the 22nd right now, and we are about to go buy shinkansen (bullet train) tickets for our trip to nagano on monday. there is a really annoying issue with paying for things with a card in japan as a tourist - there is a card payment security feature called 3dsecure, nearly all payment processing uses it. but it turns out that in america, we use a different version of it than they do in japan. this causes cards to get declined for a lot of things you’d buy online. i highly recommend anyone visiting japan to either have a non-visa card like a mastercard, or just always be prepared to pay for things with cash.

last year, i was able to pay for things with my mastercard, but for some reason that isn’t working either. its a huge headache because now it means i have to physically go to the train station days in advance and buy all my shinkansen tickets in person, rather than just doing it from my phone. i am really annoyed about this, but as far as i can tell there is nothing i can do about it.

じゃあまたね!