We arrived in Tokyo late last night. Our departure was delayed by a few hours, but we ended up sleeping most of the flight, and so we landed relatively refreshed and ready to tackle all of the late-night snacks at the closest 7-11.
The onboarding process for taking the train into the city was as easy as it could have been. I was able to add and then load their Suica card directly from Apple Wallet. (Thanks for the tips, everyone.)

Here's us, taking up too much room on the train with our two ski/snowboard bags.


However, I will say that Shinjuku station -- which is the busiest train station in the world, by far -- is just as confusing as I remember it. Between the vastness of the station and overall network, and the language barrier, it can be a real challenge to figure out where to go to make your connection.
But ultimately, we made it to our hotel, and to 7-11. In case you're wondering, and to give you an idea of scale, my legs absolutely hang off the end of these beds.

I have no idea what the circular thing was in this bowl, but it was good, hot water was readily available in the store for these purposes, and I was able to supercharge the entire thing with some charcoal-grilled chicken from a separate package.

The first time I visited Japan, I had a cell phone with one of the first ever color screens. I thought this was a huge deal. And, I had a standalone digital camera that was about the size of a small wallet. I also thought this was a huge deal. Sadly, I'm not sure where most of these photos are today (though I still have the phone).
So it's exciting to me that I'm now writing posts and sharing photos with all of you on a decentralized and open ledger that is intended to act as permanent information storage. In theory at least, these posts and these photos will be around forever, even if Paragraph as a company goes away.

Which means I'll be able to look back on the above photo and remind myself that I took it from the window above my hotel bed when I woke up at 530AM, I couldn't sleep, and I decided to just get up and write today's post. Tokyo is such an awesome city. It's great to be back after all these years.
“Tokyo is such an awesome city”. So true. So is the rest of Japan. For those of us who grew up in the west (North America, Western Europe), we absorbed the belief that we belong to the so-called “First World”. Travelling back from from my first trip to Japan, landing in western Canada and observing the built environment around me, I was suddenly struck by the following observation: There is only one First World country in the world and that country is Japan. The rest of us are merely shambolic pretenders.
It is truly remarkable that Tokyo manages to be both the largest metropolitan area in the world and one of the most livable cities.