Japan Day 2: Arriving at Narita and JR Passes

We landed at Narita airport in the early evening, and easily went through customs. As a Canadian citizen, you are only required to be carrying a passport that is valid for 6 months beyond your date of departure. Canadian citizens are granted a 90 day tourist visa upon arrival.

Two months before we left for Japan, we purchase JR passes or “Japan Rail Passes” (To Book Train Travel in Japan Click Here) from a company in Canada called Japan Experience. Rail travel in Japan can become quite expensive if you plan on seeing more than just Tokyo.For $484.50 CDN each, we purchased a 14 day rail pass for unlimited travel on JR lines within Japan. This pass included use of the JR Nartia Express train service between Narita and Tokyo Station which normally costs about 30$ CDN for a one way trip. A JR pass like the one we purchased can only be bought outside of Japan by foreigners travelling to Japan. There are many different types of JR passes available in amounts of 7day, 14day and 21days. Also you can choose “Green” or “Ordinary”. We chose an ordinary 14 day pass.

(To Book Train Travel in Japan Click Here)

Once we travelled through customs, we went to the JR counter at the airport to activate our JR passes. We traded the vouchers we had been sent in the mail, for cardstock passes (do not lose these, they are your lifeline in Japan)! The lady then helped us to reserve train passes into central Tokyo for free! We jumped on our train to Tokyo and had arrived at Tokyo Station in 60 minutes. We then hoped on the JR circle lined to take the metro to Akihabara station (the closest JR station to our hostel…or so I thought).

… We spent quite a lot of time trying to find our hostel, because Holly had mapped out the route to a different hostel in Asakusa run by the same company… oops.

Eventually we found the hostel Khaosan World Asakusa . The hostel used to be a love hotel! Our room was pretty cool, with colourful lights under the bed and a hot tub on the porch outside (I’m pretty sure it didn’t function anymore).

After checking in, we immediately left the hostel again to try and find an open mic venue in Shibuya that Jives wanted to try and preform at. The venue was called The Ruby Room.

After a few beers and entertainment, we were ready to pass out. By this time we had been awake for well over 30 hours (not a record, but exhausting enough)!