Japan Hotels

The Tokyo fish market is closed two Wednesdays a month. Either find out which ones they are, or don’t go Wednesday. We met someone who went the wrong Wednesday and said the only people there were tired and dazed tourists wondering what was going on.

Most ATM’s in Japan do not accept international visa cards, etc. in their machines as the magnetic strip on the back is a different size; ours is twice the width of their strips. Therefore the machine just spits it back out. At this stage you can only use Citibank ATM’s.

In Kyoto, a city that houses literally thousands of temples, a little planning goes a long way. Choose the four or five that seem the most intriguing, or at most, the essential eight. This will be more than enough. Sanjusangen-Do should make its way onto anyone’s itinerary. Its lineup of a thousand images of the Buddhist deity Kannon, all crafted from Japanese cyprus in the twelth and thirteenth centuries, is an astonishing display of religious devotion.

Due to widespread use of fake telephone-cards and the introduction of a digital network, conventional green colour or grey colour magnetic card phones are gradually being replaced with orange colour IC card phones. If you make calls from an urban area, it is wiser to buy IC cards. While the situation is uncertain in rural areas, it would be still better to bring a magnetic card. Even if you do not have a magnetic card, it is possible to make calls with coins. It is much harder than before to find a public phone because mobile phones are the normal communication method. Stations and convenience stores could be the best place to find one. Please bear it in mind that the cost of calls to a mobile phone shall be sky high.

For Japan, nobody told us about the existence of luggage courier services. Travelling with a baby, we sure didn’t have a spare pair of hands for dragging around all our luggage from Narita Airport to Wako-shi station in Saitama, some 1.5 hours (and TWO subway transfers) away, though somehow we survived. For all of you who will be taking more than just carry-on luggage, we recommend you enlist the help of the luggage courier companies to save your sanity as you go to and from the airport.

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