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Nov. 12th, 2023 12:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psipsyI have returned from Japan.
I managed to attend the M3 event I was excited about, and it lived up to the hype. I bought almost 150 CDs in the 4 hours I was there (the event runs for 5 hours). That many CDs weighs about 11kg. I bought from about 60 circles, out of the almost 1500 that were there. If/when I do another M3, there will be a few things I'll do differently.
Things I needed on prior trips but not this time:
-Light jacket. I brought it but didn't need it from the moment I entered the airport to the moment I came back. Tokyo was consistently warm. So were the flights. Getting around the airports meant a lot of walking which in turn meant a lot of calories getting converted to heat.
-T3i camera. This made sense in 2017 and 2018 when I had my old Samsung. The camera in my Pixel 7 is not quite at DSLR levels, but much better than the Galaxy S4. It was good enough for 99% of my picture-taking.
Getting through Customs going into Japan was easy. Getting through US Customs coming back was even easier: Look into a camera for the face-recognition, and that's it. No questions about how much stuff I was bringing back or the value, if I had any contraband, exotic fruits/veggies, animal parts, gold bricks, etc. US Customs has no concern about anime swag. The absolute worst thing about getting through US Customs and TSA when coming back is the walking. So much walking through the airports. I might have spent 5 minutes for customs and security, and about 40 minutes for non-stop walking to and from them. I blame the airports for that. Fortunately, thanks to the amount of walking required to get around Tokyo, I was better prepared for all the airport walking.
My Suica card still works! Sort of. Since it was 5 years since I last used it, it needed a refresh by a station attendant so their systems could recognize it again. Once that was done, I promptly charged it up with about $35 of fare and put that to use.
I needed to get a Japanese wallet to hold my yen bills, which are physically larger than dollars. I checked out Yodobashi Camera's selection of wallets and decided I could not justify $75 for a name-brand wallet. I then went to Don Quixote's (affectionately known to locals as Donki's) and found an $8 wallet that would do the same thing. Japanese wallets come with their own coin pouches, which was handy.
Despite having 2 suitcases and a larger carry-on bag, I still had to ship stuff home. I opted to ship home the large-but-light items such as model kits. That took a little under a week to arrive here.
The hotel I stayed in was the same one as my 2017 trip. They had not changed their wifi network name or password in over 6 years. My laptop remembered it without me needing to do anything.
I ended up not accomplishing a bunch of the things I wanted to do, as after M3, I came down with a cold. I know it was a cold because it only hit my nose and throat, no fever, and was gone on its own after a few days. There are worse things to catch these days. Nevertheless, it prevented me from doing a lot of exploration of Tokyo in general, limiting me to sticking around Akihabara, so I wouldn't be too far from my hotel room. And I was fine with that.
I got some cheap junk cameras! The kinds of cameras where if someone was selling them in the US, they'd put them on ebay, slap the word "vintage" all over the listing, claim it was mintier than a tanker truck of toothpaste, and start the bidding at some crazy price like $200. Instead I picked them up for maybe $20, at most. One of them was more like $2. Sometimes they label them as junk because they already have a bunch of them and can't be bothered to even look at the ones coming in.
There comes a point in a trip like this when I'm feeling two directly conflicting feelings: "I can't wait to get home" and "I can't wait to come back". The next Japan trip is purely hypothetical at this point but the difference between my first two trips was about 20 months, so it'll be more like 2 years. Mainly because I would want to attend an M3 again.
I managed to attend the M3 event I was excited about, and it lived up to the hype. I bought almost 150 CDs in the 4 hours I was there (the event runs for 5 hours). That many CDs weighs about 11kg. I bought from about 60 circles, out of the almost 1500 that were there. If/when I do another M3, there will be a few things I'll do differently.
Things I needed on prior trips but not this time:
-Light jacket. I brought it but didn't need it from the moment I entered the airport to the moment I came back. Tokyo was consistently warm. So were the flights. Getting around the airports meant a lot of walking which in turn meant a lot of calories getting converted to heat.
-T3i camera. This made sense in 2017 and 2018 when I had my old Samsung. The camera in my Pixel 7 is not quite at DSLR levels, but much better than the Galaxy S4. It was good enough for 99% of my picture-taking.
Getting through Customs going into Japan was easy. Getting through US Customs coming back was even easier: Look into a camera for the face-recognition, and that's it. No questions about how much stuff I was bringing back or the value, if I had any contraband, exotic fruits/veggies, animal parts, gold bricks, etc. US Customs has no concern about anime swag. The absolute worst thing about getting through US Customs and TSA when coming back is the walking. So much walking through the airports. I might have spent 5 minutes for customs and security, and about 40 minutes for non-stop walking to and from them. I blame the airports for that. Fortunately, thanks to the amount of walking required to get around Tokyo, I was better prepared for all the airport walking.
My Suica card still works! Sort of. Since it was 5 years since I last used it, it needed a refresh by a station attendant so their systems could recognize it again. Once that was done, I promptly charged it up with about $35 of fare and put that to use.
I needed to get a Japanese wallet to hold my yen bills, which are physically larger than dollars. I checked out Yodobashi Camera's selection of wallets and decided I could not justify $75 for a name-brand wallet. I then went to Don Quixote's (affectionately known to locals as Donki's) and found an $8 wallet that would do the same thing. Japanese wallets come with their own coin pouches, which was handy.
Despite having 2 suitcases and a larger carry-on bag, I still had to ship stuff home. I opted to ship home the large-but-light items such as model kits. That took a little under a week to arrive here.
The hotel I stayed in was the same one as my 2017 trip. They had not changed their wifi network name or password in over 6 years. My laptop remembered it without me needing to do anything.
I ended up not accomplishing a bunch of the things I wanted to do, as after M3, I came down with a cold. I know it was a cold because it only hit my nose and throat, no fever, and was gone on its own after a few days. There are worse things to catch these days. Nevertheless, it prevented me from doing a lot of exploration of Tokyo in general, limiting me to sticking around Akihabara, so I wouldn't be too far from my hotel room. And I was fine with that.
I got some cheap junk cameras! The kinds of cameras where if someone was selling them in the US, they'd put them on ebay, slap the word "vintage" all over the listing, claim it was mintier than a tanker truck of toothpaste, and start the bidding at some crazy price like $200. Instead I picked them up for maybe $20, at most. One of them was more like $2. Sometimes they label them as junk because they already have a bunch of them and can't be bothered to even look at the ones coming in.
There comes a point in a trip like this when I'm feeling two directly conflicting feelings: "I can't wait to get home" and "I can't wait to come back". The next Japan trip is purely hypothetical at this point but the difference between my first two trips was about 20 months, so it'll be more like 2 years. Mainly because I would want to attend an M3 again.
