1 November 2019
The station is so station
Eating ramen at the ramen street at Tokyo station
As skillfully predicted, not many photos tonight. This is one of the things I type often, apology for not many photos.
Tonight I had to figure out what train pass to get to cover my journey tomorrow and subsequent journeys at a discounted cost. There is no one train pass that covers all the places I am going to except the full Japan train pass that costs a fortune. I think I have come up with a plan to get the JR East Nagano Niigata Area Pass to get from Tokyo to Takasaki, then Takasaki to Niigata, then probably most of the way back. This allows any 5 days use out of a 14 day period, so I will need to use it on a couple of day trips too.
Then I will use the JR East Tohoku Area Pass, which will cover Yamagata, Koriyama and back to Tokyo. This pass also allows 5 days usage out of 14, so I will again do a couple of long day trips with it. That one is easier to use up as it even works in Tokyo along the Chuo and Ome lines so I can use it at the back end of my trip.
The tricky day is to get from Niigata to Yamagata.
When I booked this trip I planned to use a combination of a minimum 3 local trains that go over the mountains, but this is only one service a day, and theres some suggestion one of the lines is a bus replacement currently. This method would also take at least an hour longer than catching the Shinkansen almost all the way back to Tokyo and then all the way north to Yamagata. The Shinkansen would be far easier, more comfortable, and more likely to get there. However if I wasnt traveling on a discount rail pass, it would be very expensive. So my current plan is on this day to use the Niigata pass to catch the Shinkansen back to Omiya in the north of Tokyo, then buy the Tohoku pass at Omiya and make an immediate booking to Yamagata from there. Should be a fun day!
Now that I have completed that long winded explanation that is poorly worded and meaningless to everyone except me, after buying my first of probably 2 passes I went to Tokyo station, ate ramen in the underground ramen street, came back to my hotel and wrote this very long sentence.
Here is the aforementioned Tokyo station. Its an underground city, with some above ground bits.
The above ground huge lit up roof is very impressive, but there are not many eating places up here, to the underground!
Surprisingly, huge lines at all the underground eating establishments. I would have thought people would like to venture outside on a Friday night. Not me obviously.
I selected a place with a medium length line, maybe 10 people, bought my ticket and waited for some delicious ramen. It was supposed to be very spicy but it was not. Also, I hate it when they picture the egg cut in half, but then they dont cut it in half! Its too big to swallow hole and cutting it up with chopsticks just causes it to disintegrate. Now that all that whingeing is out the way, it was in fact very nice.