Somewhere in June I decided on taking a long trip somewhere to get away from it all. I knew it would be Asia.

In Oktober I finally booked the tickets. Tokyo, Japan 3/11 - 29/11.

For this first entry I will try to show how long the travel was from Stockholm, Sweden.

From Arlanda airport the first stop was Beijing, China. The flight was a Boeing 777 piloted by Air China and around 8 hours. The service was top notch and they knew english much better than I had heard.

For almost the entire trip there was nothing at all to see through the windows. During the night time the staff wanted the shutters closed so passengers could sleep. About an hour before landing I had a sudden urge to open the shutter to look out. Not even five minutes after I saw the great wall. I'm pretty sure I was the only one to see it. After that it was a whole hour of only mountains and desert.

I had to walk a long way from the arrival to the transfer gate. Which was good since I had four long hours to kill. Luckily there was a wifi station there that was free for travelers.

Beijing needs to do something about it's air pollution. Before I got onto the transfer plane (a smaller Boeing) I was starting to get a headache from the smell.

By the time we got into the air I was starting to nod off a bit from lack of sleep. Three hours later we finally landed at Narita airport, Tokyo.

Immigration should have been easy but I missed filling out papers since I was so sleepy, so it took extra time.

After that I made the mistake of taking the cheap option for the train ride to Tokyo. Warning, don't take the cheap option. The Keisiei train took 1.20 hours to get to Ueno station. I was pretty out of it once I got there.

There I had to switch to Hayiba line for a train to Minami-Senju station. But how do we get the ticket? I stood there guessing for a while at the ticket machine. After observing other passengers and asking around (no one understood english) I finally guessed that you had to check the big board for the price range to punch in. Ueno->Minamin-Senju had a 160 yen tag on it. I clicked that on the machine and put in some money and got my ticket. After finding the platform the rest of the trip was easy. Note: I was at first at the wrong machines. You have to use the machines at the train line you want to use or they wont be able to hand you a ticket.

The rest of the trip to the hotel was straight forward. I had checked google maps for the walk from the station to the hotel and that made it easy. Google street view is a wondeful invention.

At the hotel they were very good at english and I had an easy time checking in. But I need to eat before sleeping. Luckily wednesdays were free Suki-Yaki at the Aizuya pub, which was located at the other side of the main street. It's a nice pub managed by the same staff.

I'm still catching up on my backlog of pictures. I've already had another day of exploring which I will show in my next blog. But right now I have to find something to eat before my third day in Japan.