Erek Speed

Another installment of my life in Japan.

Narita is a pretty simple airport so I didn’t have much trouble with it.  I changed about 100 dollars into yen, and then withdrew about 300 more from an ATM.  I did the cash exchange simply because you never know when an american bank will decide to not let you have money overseas.  I had let them know beforehand of course, but this was to be on the safe side.

JR, which runs a large portion of the railways in Japan, has a good deal called “Suica + N’Ex.”  It lets me get a train ride to Tokyo while also getting the rechargeable “Suica” card for use on any train or subway in the Tokyo area.   I also elected to have my heavier non-clothes suitcase sent via takkyubin, a delivery service which will bring you your bags the next morning for about 15 dollars.  (Hauling bags through Tokyo sucks, so this is nice.)

The train ride could have been better though.  It turns out they double sold my seat, and so this girl ended up sitting on her boyfriends lap.  It’s really rare for such an error to happen in Japan, and I was lucky that it was resolved so smoothly.  It was still a slightly awkward trip however.

After arriving in Tokyo (Shinjuku station), it was a pretty simple task of finding the apartment agency, Sakura House, and filling out the remaining paper work and getting my keys.  Sakura House is probably the largest provider of short term housing for foreigners but people’s mileage seem to vary greatly.  So far, they’ve been pretty good (they replaced my chair), and my room is nice, so I’m not going to say anything bad about them.

Getting to my station was pretty easy, but it took a bit of time to find my apartment.  Address don’t go in numerical order here so you usually just have to use a map to try to find the exact place.  This time I had to walk around the block once, which isn’t the worst I’ve been lost in Tokyo. 😛

That’s all for now, next time I’ll talk about some of the logistics I had to take care of the first few days I was here.