Getting close now, and I’m trying to get everything set up before I leave. Â Laundry, packing, re-packing due to forgetting something, re-re-packing due to everything I want to take not fitting, etc. Â At least I finished my taxes, and managed to get some pictures of this year’s cherry blossoms downtown. Â Checking the weather at Chicago where I lay over for a couple of hours, and the long-range forecast for Tokyo and vicinity for next week.
Two things I plan to do to make this trip a bit easier than the ones before, one of them I’d been planning for some time, and one came out of the blue since I had no idea they even had them. Â One, a service that nearly all hotels provide or at least cooperate with shipping companies to provide, is called “takkyubin”, which is a baggage-forwarding service. Â If you’re hotel-hopping like I plan to, it’s great because you can turn in your suitcase at the hotel or nearby convenience store or delivery office, and for a small fee they’ll send it off to your next destination, usually delivered by the next day. Â This saves having to lug the whole mess around, trying to find space on the train or subway car. Â They can send it to the airport as well, which sounds horrible to us paranoid Americans, but in Japan it’s completely safe. Â In fact, the main delivery company Yamamoto, has as their logo a mother cat carrying a kitten!
The other nice surprise I found is that there are at least a half-dozen companies in Japan that will rent 4G LTE wi-fi hotspots to tourists! Â I was worried about trying not to use too much of the hotels’ bandwith, or trying to find a public wi-fi spot that wasn’t crowded. Â This is exactly what I’m renting from T-Mobile to use here, I’ve been able to get great speeds with wide access, and according to the Japanese sites, their companies provide hi-speed hot-spots that work all over the country! Â The rates are reasonable, too, the one place I’m looking at will rent the box for about $90 total for the two weeks, which even though it’s twice what I’m paying here, it’s JAPAN!
At any rate, blogging will be sparse between now and when I land in Narita, but I’ll try to keep this blog up-to-date!