Day 18: Training

Today, I visited the Toden Arakawa Base, which I think is supposed to be the head office for the Toden Sakura Tram, which is now operated by Toei Transportation (AKA Tokyo Metropolitan Bureau of Transportation). I had wanted to visit the Toden Memorial Square, which is sort of like a museum that showcases a few old tram cars from the 1950s and 60s.

Howeever, I didn't realize that the museum portion was only open on the weekends. However, since I was there already, I decided to get some Toaran mascot merch! I ended up getting the limited Halloween Toaran keychain and the guy threw in some free stickers and the themed bag too even though I clearly didn't need it for a single keychain.

I also found an angry-looking Toaran outside warning me to not park there.

I actually end up taking photos of Toaran signs kind of often since they are always so funny and expressive

Please don't walk in the station while playing with your smartphone!

Thank you for having the proper etiquette on board!

Actually, as a side tangent and speaking of sings that I've taken pictures of, I had seen this crossbow prohibition sign in my local station and had wondered why there needed to be a sign to ban crossbows in the station. But it turns out that it's just an old poster that was never taken down and is a relic of a country-wide crossbow prohibition that went into effect in 2022! So it's not that there was specifically issues with this station being besieged in the past.

Anyway, after my failed expedition to see the train museum, I ended up walking along the Sumida river for a while. I didn't end up doing too much but it was a nice casual walk.

One intersting thing about walking around in the Arakawa area is that it feels more lived in than a lot of the more touristy places you'd visit like Ginza or Akihabara. Since the place I was going probably isn't even super popular as a tourist destination for locals, I didn't see many tourists around and no foreigners other than me. I had actually begun to wonder where all the working age adults were since I'd only seen older people and school kids walking around but then I realized they were all just at work since it was like 4 PM on a Wednesday.

After walking around and hanging out for a while, I collected some station stamps at the Kumanomae and Nippori stations, and then popped into Akihabara since it was on the way back to where I'm staying. I had wanted to check out the Mister Donuts that I had mentioned the other day again. Unfortunately, it had a huge crowd/line once I had arrived. I thought I had taken a picture but it looks like I didn't, so have this one from Reddit instead. Needless to say, I didn't get any donuts on the way home but my scale is probably thanking me!