My first Shinkansen trip

So with all that being said, I booked a two-night stay in a Nagano hotel after about two hours of scouting and planning on the night of the 4th, and checked out of my last hotel, Centurion “plates are extra” Hotel Residential, after leaving them a scathingly mixed review. Getting to the iconic Tokyo Station for my first shinkansen trip was easy enough, a 9 minute ride on the Marunouchi Line, which wasn’t (and had never been, as far as I saw) particularly packed, did the trick. Couldn’t use my JR Pass on this line though, as this was a Tokyo Metro line, and not one of those whose names started with JR.

Tokyo Station’s shinkansen staging area was pretty massive. The shinkansen ticket gates looked like this:

That’s where one would usually use the first ticket, the general shinkansen ticket, which my JR Pass worked for. I immediately went to queue up for a non-reserved seat on the train to Nagano, of which there were two essentially nearly identical options, the Asama and the Hakutaka, with only slightly different routes. As Japan Station was on one end of the line, I saw the train stop and get ready for the next journey, which included all the seats being “turned” around so they were facing the “front” of the train in the new direction that the train would be moving in.

I got cold feet at this point though, partially because I still wasn’t sure if the JR Pass would be enough to get an unreserved seat yet or whether I would have to go pick up an “unreserved seat ticket” or something to accompany it, and partially because I decided I wanted to check out the midori no madaguchi or the green shinkansen ticket machines anyway, and get a reserved seat ticket for my travel log collection. So I sacrificed making that train, instead aiming for the next one about half an hour later or so, and heading for the ticket machines in the meantime. I had to pass through the ticket gates again, thank goodness for my JR Pass. The ticket machines were very easy to figure out, especially since they had an English option too, and I soon had my reserved seat ticket in hand for free. As I still had some time before my train would arrive, I decided to wander the immediate vicinity of the ticket gates, and found another thing that I knew existed but had not seen yet — an ekiben shop!

An ekiben is basically a train (eki) lunch (bento), a little disposable lunchbox generally packed with rice and some sort of meat, vegetable, or side dish that was easy to eat and wasn’t pungent or spillable for the most part. I wanted to make sure that I ate as many of these as humanly possible. This shop, named Ekibenya Matsuri, was extremely packed though, and moving through that shop was like walking through mud, since nearly everyone had luggage that they were manouvering as well.

I eventually found my victim though. An Okukuji Shamo Ben from (or claiming to be from) nearby Ibaraki Prefecture, purchased for 1155 yen.

With that in hand, I headed out to the shinkansen waiting area again as my train’s departure time wasn’t too far off. On the platform, I found the most expensive drink vending machine yet, with one drink costing over 200 yen.

Someone’s taking advantage of thirsty travellers! It’s weird, because so far I’ve noticed that central/popular vending machines are cheaper than out of the way ones, but those on train station platforms tend to be a little more expensive than, say, those just outside the station. And this one was a bump up from that even.

There was also a second Ekibenya Matsuri store here, on the platform itself, much smaller in size but also much less crowded. They weren’t selling the ekiben that I had picked up though so I couldn’t compare prices.

My train, the Asama 611, was waiiting for me on the left there, even though there were still 15 minutes to go before the train would leave, so I hopped on board.

Cool. I had an aisle seat, and there was someone in the window seat for most of the trip, but no one was in the middle seat. These seats were a lot more spacious and comfortable than airplane seats. There was also a luggage rack above and I put my duffel bag in there. I had my ekiben lunch once the train got going, and it was delicious!

This journey took 1 hour and 48 minutes. Once the person in the window seat left, I shifted over to take some pictures of the Nagano (Prefecture) countryside that we were going by as well. It was pretty, with lots of mountains and trees, but the window reflection and the walls next to the shinkansen tracks made it difficult to take good pictures, so I mostly watched and enjoyed it amidst working on my blog on my laptop, since each seat on this train had access to a power plug.

Soon enough, we arrived at Nagano Station, the other end of this line from Tokyo Station where it started, and I packed up and got out of the train.

I went down to the ticket machine to book a few reserved tickets for the next couple days, since I had a good idea of how they worked now, and then walked to my hotel. My hotel was about 20 to 30 minutes away, and the pictures I took are in the following gallery.