Journey to Ueda City

The morning was frigid, something like 3-4 degrees Celsius at around 6:00 am, though it was 8 degrees by the time I left the building around 9:00, and more or less rapidly rising. From the glorious Hotel Unicorn, I walked back south to the dilapidated shopping street, then east from there, and found an entrance to the local subway system. This local train system was not affiliated with JR, so my JR Pass wouldn’t work, and in fact I was told that even my Suica fare card wouldn’t work here, I had to buy a little ticket from the ticket machine for 170 yen.

The train station reminded me of a Left 4 Dead 2 map or some other game where I’d be running from zombies through those tunnels and stopping on either side to look for loot.

The inside of the train looked like this:

The most interesting part of this ride came at the ticket gates of the end station, Nagano Station. There were ticket officers holding baskets and waiting to take the little tickets from us as we went through the gate, so I didn’t even get to keep it as a souvenir.

Oh well. There was a big selection of vending machines at that Nagano Station too.

And that concludes my brief encounter with the Nagano Electric Railway Line, or Nagaden, as that was the only time in the Nagano lag of my trip that I used it. Especially since getting out of the station and to the shinkansen travel point took several minutes of walking and figuring out and eventually made me miss my shinkansen train by two minutes. That was fine though, because with the JR Pass, my booking and rebooking was free anyway (this is NOT the case if I had missed the train after booking it, but I wouldn’t have booked it early if I didn’t have a JR Pass, I would have booked it after arriving on the day itself). I couldn’t actually book a ride on the next train myself because it somehow mystifyingly “overlapped” with the train that I was supposed to be on though, so I had to go to the office for it, but a nice lady there took my JR pass and the ticket that I had just missed and took care of it without much of an issue.

It’s also worth noting here that in some stations like Nagano and Shinjuku and probably Tokyo, there are two JR ticket stations, a normal one and a “JR East Travel Service Center” (I assume there’s a similar one on the JR West side of the country too). The normal one usually has a long line of Japanese people, but foreigners with the JR Pass are not really supposed to use that one — the JR East Travel Service Center generally does not have a line and is where we are supposed to go to make changes if the green booking machines do not suffice. In Ueda City, however, there is no JR East Travel Service Center, and I had to go to the regular JR ticket center to make my desired changes, later on in the day.

Anyway, changing the ticket meant I had extra time to kill before catching my train. That meant shopping for an ekiben! I picked this Makunouchi Bento up from a convenience store named Shinanoki for 1200 yen:

And had it in the waiting room in the station, since the journey from Nagano to Ueda was only going to be 12 minutes or so.

A few blinks of the eye later, and i was in Ueda Station!

Ueda leans into the samurai part of its history and this can be seen everywhere — not only that stand in Ueda Station but all around town in shops, this visitor information center display below, themed merchandise, etc.

And all the people dressed up as samurai. Oh wait, that was due to today’s event.