After 1 year of planning and hours spending to prepare the itinerary, this day has finally come! For my flight to Tokyo I opted to take Malaysian Airlines because they had this really crazy offer at RM729 for one way. The alternative in Air Asia was about RM600. It was a no brainer to decide really. It's really been years since I last took a full service airline. But thanks to serious competition among the airlines I can afford to do so.
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| Loooong long queue for the check in counters. |
Food served on the flight was decent. You would never go hungry on a full service airline that's for sure.
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| Japanese meal |
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| Chicken sandwich |
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| One of the best Vailla Ice Cream ever |
After 7 hours on the flight I finally arrived at the land of the rising sun. Thankfully there weren't much crowd at that hour and I managed to clear the immigration at Narita Airport pretty quickly. It was really nice that they had finally removed the visa-requirement to enter Japan. No issues at all and no questions asked. I had wanted to take the Narita Sky Access straight to Asakusa (where my hostel was located nearby) but after some confusion we settled for a normal limited express ticket. Upon further exploration of the airport you could actually easily buy the train tickets at a level lower of the Departure Hall.
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| Narita Airport! |
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| All signboards are mostly in Traditional Mandarin words. If you can read Mandarin you can travel around Japan pretty well. |
About 40 minutes later we finally arrived at Asakusabashi subway station. The first thing that we did was to secure a PASMO card and reload it with ¥10,000;. This card is the equivalent of Touch n Go back in Malaysia and it can be used for most of the train stations around in Japan. Other than PASMO, there are other similiar derivatives of the IC card under different names. All can be used as the companies have since united their ticketing system.
Prior to coming to Japan, I also booked a Wi-Fi dongle (shareable with 5 people) from
Global Advanced Communications for 11 days at only ¥8,200. They posted the dongle directly to my hostel without hassle. All I had to do was to drop the dongle into an envelope they provided into a random mailbox. Overall the connectivity was really good and I was able to get connected at most parts of Japan. Best of all there were no limit on data. Highly recommended!
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| IC card machine |
And then we were off to start our journey in Japan :)
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