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Hello Tokyo

Brandon Donnelly

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.)

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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
travel
snowboarding
14th-annual
subway
metro
transit
mobility
public-transit
japan
arweave
photography

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Brandon Donnelly

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