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My second post from Tokyo. Wow. Doing some blogging now; it doesn’t even hurt yet.

I did it! I conquered the Tokyo subway! It wasn’t too hard.

Here is a quick recap of what I learned yesterday:

In the Tokyo subway systems there are several ‘lines’ such as the Ginza Line and the Eido Line and each one has a certain route. The lines overlap so you take, for example, the Ginza Line to a certain stop that crosses over to the Eido Line and then get on that line if you need to so that you can reach your destination.

It is fairly easy to understand the subway maps hanging on the walls once you get the basics down.

The trains are frequent and all you need to know is either the name of the place you are going or the first letter of the Line and the station number of where you want to go. For example, G6 is the station outside the hotel where I am staying. It is the 6th station on the Ginza line. Yesterday I ended up on E12, which is the 12th stop on the Eido line, to get to the museum I went to.

One thing I don’t like about the trains is the money machines. They give you about 1 second to choose English text and to start trying to figure out how much to pay, etc, before they go back to Japanese. Well, that isn’t a very good description but anyway the money machines are a pain but once you fiddle with them a few times you get the hang of it.

I went to the Eido - Tokyo museum yesterday. It was a pretty cool place to go. Most of the musuem is located in the part that is hanging over the ground. I read a review that said it looked like an imperial walker but I don’t know about that. It was impressive though. It is a large structure.

There is a massive escalator that goes up to the museum.

There are many scale models throughout the museum that show life in Tokyo (Edo) throughout the last 400 years.

And most of the exhibits have pretty good English signs so that you can figure out what some of them are. Although in some places there is about 7,000,000 Japanese symbols describing something and one word in English that says something like ‘Dress’.

There are a lot of good examples of Japanese art and some interesting glimpses into Japanese life in the past. All in all it was a good time.

I didn’t go anywhere else, except to eat my favorite pork dish, because it was raining. I will try again today. Hopefully it will not be raining.

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