ueno park

we had a couple odds and ends to deal with today, and visited ueno park.

as mentioned in the tail end of my post yesterday, there are some annoyances with paying for things online when in japan. last year, i was able to use one of my credit cards, a mastercard, to buy things like shinkansen tickets online. this lets you just pick the tickets up from a machine at the station right before your trip. it is extremely convenient. but for some inexplicable reason, we arent able to do so this time. we tried 4 cards of mine and 2 of my mom’s, and nothing will allow us to make online purchases. this even extends to setting up a transit card on my mom’s phone. she has an iphone, so she is supposed to be able to just set up her phone to work as a transit card, like i did last year. but due to this payment issue, she can add the card to her phone but cannot add any money to it. had we known this on arrival, we could have easily bought a second card for her when i bought mine.

thanks to the incredible shinobu-san, we were able to avoid going back to the airport and standing in a 40 minute line to buy another one. she has a spare suica card she lends to people staying in the units she rents out, so we were able to just borrow that. truly an incredible person. shinobu-san for prime minister of japan!

once we had the transit card problem addressed, we were able to take trains, which meant that we were able to address the other payment related issues of the trip: converting $ to ¥ and buying shinkansen tickets for our journey to nagano and back on the 28th.

i was under the impression the tickets had to be purchased from the station the shinkansen was departing from, but thankfully this was not the case. shinobu-san informed me that most “big” stations have a jr ticket machine that will allow you to buy tickets for any shinkansen operated by that particular branch of japan railways (jr). there are 6 different branches of jr - jr east, jr west, jr central, jr hokkaido, jr shikoku, and jr kyushu. in this case, we just needed to go to any jr east station, of which there are many.

my trip will involve (i think) jr east, jr west, and jr kyushu. i am 99% sure i will not interact with jr central, as my trip from tokyo is a jr east line that goes to kanazawa, and then from there it will be a jr west line to nara. i will also not be visiting the island of shikoku or hokkaido this trip.

because of this payment system annoyance, i have to go in person to a station in each jurisdiction and buy my tickets in advance. this will be giant pain in the ass, and will remove a lot of flexibility on my trip. i will have to basically buy my departure tickets from each area the day i arrive there, and have my exact departure time figured out way in advance. it is annoying, but manageable.

for today though, we only needed the trip to nagano and back, which was much easier to figure out since we specifically have to take the 7:52 -> 9:30 train on the morning of the 28th, and already know we will be returned to the station at 5:30 pm that evening. so it was easy to decide which tickets to buy.

the payment issue we are experiencing is specific to online purchases, and does not exist when paying for things in person. so we just had to go to the machine at gotanda station, choose the tickets we wanted, and could use a card without issue.

tickets in hand, the next thing to figure out was converting the $ we had into ¥. the trains are extremely easy to navigate when you have google maps, so i just searched “currency conversion” on google maps, found a place not too far away at a different station, and we took a train there. the place we found offered a rate of ¥138 per $1. the actual exchange rate is $149.3 at time of writing, but losing 7 cents per dollar isn’t too bad. we converted our money and felt very accomplished, having completed everything we set out to do with relative ease. but then we realized it was only 10:00 am and we had the entire day to kill. i had intentionally planned nothing for today to give us time to adjust to jetlag and sort out these kinds of issues. but we were already out and about, and decided to check out ueno park. i had wanted to visit ueno last year, but i canceled my plans that day because my feet were dead after the trip to nagano.

we took a quick train to ueno and walked around the park for a bit.