今にゃんじゃない

After a long flight from Detroit, I arrived at Haneda airport. I was suprisingly not not too exhausted. I was thankful that I had learned how various things worked my last time in Japan so getting to the Hotel was not as hectic as it was on my last trip

1. Arriving at Haneda before 5pm

The help desks where you can pick up your sim card or portable wifi generally close around 5pm. So, if you need to pick anything up it's much better to arrive at a time where you can do it immediately. Last time, I had to come back to Tokyo Station to pick up all of my devices from the airport.

2. Having a transit card already

Since I arrived at Tokyo Station with a transit card already, I didn't have to worry about calculating the prices of Train tickets to my hotel. Recently, Tokyo stopped giving long term cards to foreigners so I'm actually pretty luck to have this card from my last trip. I was able to quickly get on the train and head to my hotel. Last time, I had no Japanese yen and no transit card so I was very stressed out about how I could get to my hotel. My friend brought all the yen for me but I hadn't met with him yet. This time, it was about ten times easier and smoother.

3. Visa / Discover don't work for refilling the transit card (for some reason)

This apparently is a known thing after doing a google search, but both Visa and Discover don't work for reloading your virtual transit card. Unfortunately, every single card I have is Visa or Discover with the exception of my American Express. However, I haven't set up my American Express to Apple wallet so I wasn't able to reload the virtual transit card my whole time last trip and also this trip. I later lost my transit card so not being able to reload the virtual one became a real pain. However, I got pretty good at learning the transit from needing to calculate my ticket prices all the time

4. Opting to have internet/phone service on my phone instead of the rechargable portable wifi

Last time, we had a portable wifi we carried around with us. It needed recharged every night and basically provided the same service that the phones provided. The only benefit was that my Ipad could also connect to the portable hotspot. Overall, I felt the annoyance of having this hotspot was not really worth the benefit. I opted to just have phone service on my Phone instead of needing to care about the hotspot and carry it around.

5. My phone was already set up to utilize the sim card in Japan.

Last time, my phone was essentially unusable for about an hour while I tried to figure out how to download the appropriate software. This was unavoidable, but since I have the same phone this time I didn't need to do anything special and everything just worked.

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After arriving at my hotel, my friend Monchan met with me at the hotel and we went out to get some dinner and talk over coffee. First, we stopped by a pretty common Ramen place, I forget the name, but it was very delicious. I mentioned to Monchan how I'm always suprised how Japanese people are able to eat every single grain of rice and leve the bowl completeley clean. I'm good at using chopsticks, but not good enough to collect every single grain of rice without giving up in frustration. Monchan explained that he uses the larger pieces of food to collect the last grains, but I still think it's some sort of Japanese magic.

We later went to Komeda's Coffee, a coffee chain that can be found all around Japan. I ordered some coffee that came with red beans on the bottom. I don't think this is a common menu item accross Japan, but I really liked it and would order it again. I also absolutely love red beans so I might be biased. It's pretty rare to find red beans in American foods, if at all, so whenever I'm in Japan I opt for the red bean option a majority of the time.

After getting coffee, I made a stop to the convenience store and grabbed some of the halloween themed desserts. There are much more sweet potato flavor desserts in Japan than I've seen in America, and I absolutely love sweet potatoes. I could already tell I'd be gaining weight on this trip from how many of the deserts I want to try and the lack of intense exercise I'd be doing, with the exception of walking. Oh well, 仕方がないねLue lisää