Day 0: Housekeeping and Arrival

A quick prelude before the storm!

Just kidding. A few notes before starting this year's Japan travel blog. I was once again able to use my company's work abroad benefit to take advantage of living in Japan for a month, so that's pretty exciting. I will be here until November 13, so exactly a month.

I had plans for a different format I would use for my blog this year, but things fell through since I didn't actually work on it LOL. I still want to do something, so will be reverting to my default static site blog since I can get it up and running very quickly and easily. That being said, I don't plan on having as detailed updates as I had last year. I think that I had burned myself out a bit by going out, blogging, and working a full work day every day. I might end up doing long blog posts but I don't want to set that expectation.

My main goal is that this year I actually write the final blog post. LOL Last year, I had mentioned that I had one final post to write but I never did it and eventually it was too late and I forgot what I had planned on talking about. So, that's something I plan to ensure I actually do this time. Even if I skip some days of blogging, I will at least have a post that covers content up until the last second I was in Japan.

Without further ado, 行きましょう!

Day 0 was basically just a travel day. I left home at 10 AM for my 1 PM flight, which took 9 hours (I think it arrived early!). I only managed to sleep an hour on the flight and I'm not really totally sure how the rest of the time seemed to pass so quickly. Like all I was doing was watching YouTube videos and counting how many drinks my neighbor was having. The flight was pretty smooth overall and the meals weren't bad.

I landed around 3 PM and I was trapped in the Narita airport for an hour going through immigration, but luckily customs was basically instant. Quick tip for anyone planning a Japan trip, if you fill out your trip information ahead of time on Visit Japan Web, you will get a QR code that you can use to breeze through Immigration and Customs without having to fill out the paperwork on the plane or at the airport.

At least the Pokemon were there to welcome me

One other thing, I flew into Narita this time due to having to fly on JAL for whatever reason my past self made up, but I definitely don't recommend that if you can fly into Haneda. Haneda just seems so much closer. My train ride to my AirBnb felt much longer than last year.

Tomorrow, I'm planning on something that might be familiar to reader's of last year's blog, so look forward to it!