Day 40 - Arrival at Tokyo

After the drama of the flight here, everything was smooth. Customs, luggage, the lot.
It was now about 7am.
We headed straight to the Tokyo Narita station inside the airport and bought our tickets for this week.
They use a similar (but better) version of our Oyster card.
Called Suica, you load money onto this card and tap in and out at the beginning and end of journeys, just like Oyster, with a few key differences.
There are no penalty fares or any of this rubbish. There are adjustment machines at every station. If you have bought the wrong ticket or don't have enough money on your Suica to finish your journey, head to these machines and they will charge you the remaining balance.
If you don't KNOW how much you should be paying to get to a certain place, they TELL you to buy the cheapest ticket possible, and go to an adjustment machine at the next station.
The next major difference is you can also use them as payment elsewhere, at some selected shops and food places! The all-in-one Oyster card, not bad.
Then we boarded the Narita Express to Tokyo. You guessed it, they also do trains a lot better than England.

All seats are reserved, your ticket has the details on it, and the platforms all have clear markings of where each car of the train will stop. Easy peasy.

The train arrived and we boarded. The luggage storage is awesome! You pull a cord out, wrap it around your luggage, and place it in the lock. Then, you set a padlock code and that's it! Secure free luggage storage.

The seats were massive, there was tons of legroom, a trolley service, WiFi(!), plugs, 3 TVs in each carriage that show the current weather, delays on train lines, etc. They need that on London trains!

The transport system is fairly easy for me to understand because I'm so used to Londons transport system.

The JR Lines are the equivalent of our overground services (South West Trains, Southern, etc) and the Tokyo Metropolitan, which runs through central Tokyo is the equivalent of our London Underground.

We arrived at our hostel and it's beautiful! So traditional and they even have a rockpile of rocks from Mt Fuji! I'll take some pictures for tomorrow's blog post.

By the time we were properly settled in, and had walked around town for a little bit to become accustomed to our surroundings, it was about 6pm. We got in the shower and headed out to Akihabara, known as the 'Electric District' for its arcades, electrical and technology stores.

Of course we played in the arcades. Tekken 6 is a favourite of mine, but more about that tomorrow!

We got a few snaps but we got there quite late, so we'll get some better ones when we return.

I think we're going to have plenty of fun here!