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Posts tagged “smartphones

Last Minute Shinkansen Tickets (Japan – Autumn 2018 Day 15)

It had been planned all along that my group and I would travel to Kyoto toward the end of their stay here in Japan, and the beginning of the middle portion for my own stay.

In talking with them about getting the tickets, for an inexplicable reason I thought they told me that they would be purchasing the tickets this week… as it turned out, they had ALREADY booked their tickets and had to pick them up from Tokyo Station! I started to get worried, because they used a booking agency to purchase theirs and I was concerned that the number of non-reserved seating would be sold out by this time.

So, after I finished working this morning, I traveled to Tokyo Station with them to see about tickets. They started the procedure to pick up their tickets and once they had all of the pertinent information, Joy explained the whole process to me, and showed me how much I could save by booking through the same website.

So, I walked up to the kiosk and had a number assigned to me.

My ticket for my place in line – 608 was the number but not indicative of how many persons were waiting!

Since I knew there would be a bit of a wait, I went ahead and booked my tickets online, right there on my phone. Now, I know that smartphones are clearly not a new or novel thing but it still delights me that you can do practically anything anywhere, and it was quite convenient to already be in the queue to pick up tickets, purchase tickets while waiting and then picking them up minutes after! The process online took merely 2-3 minutes and my wait in the queue was around 10 minutes, plus another 3 for the tickets to print. They must have a slow printer!

Tickets in hand and much relieved to actually HAVE shinkansen tickets… at a 22% discount too! We then took a stroll into the Minato Ward… I was feeling the nostalgia hard at that point because I recognized so many places that I would walk past or visit during my time here in 2015- definitely not a touristy area and I love that it’s sparsely visited because there are fewer people.

Paulina needed to visit Daiso, and I stopped along the way to take some photos. I caught up with them a few minutes later and we decided on eating Burger King since it was near and burgers sounded delicious. I hadn’t eaten Burger King in 3 years and it was also in Tokyo (Odaiba) … I can’t even tell you how long its been since having BK in the USA!

Not an eventful day for adventures, but certainly a day of getting things done.