A couple notes from the morning. I went to bed at midnight and was out like a light nearly immediately, but was up by 4am again. Probably because I didn’t turn off the lights before falling asleep. That’s fine though since I have lots of little things I want to get ahead of so I can sleep well tonight.

Breakfast was yesterday’s pile of little buns, they’re called Chigiri Bread or Pull-Apart Bread, though there’s a variety of names for them. Each one of the six conjoined pieces was a different flavour, and it was pretty good overall.

My Android phone camera started making a clicking noise everytime I take a picture, which it did not do during my last trip and which I hate. Apparently it’s an anti-creep thing in South Korea and Japan. Anyway after a bit of fiddling I quickly found out how to fix it — it didn’t happen the last time because I never turned off my virtual SIM card from Telus Mobility while I was here, which caused some kerfuffle with accidental calls to the stupid Voicemail app once I got home. This time, I have a virtual SIM from a different Canadian phone provider, Virgin Mobile, and I had disabled that on the plane after also receiving yet another spam call that went to unanswerable voicemail.

Anyway, turning the virtual SIM off caused the phone’s camera app to eventually — not immediately, but several hours later, or upon next reboot — start doing the clicking noise when I take pictures. I re-enabled the virtual SIM but gave it as limited a scope as possible, leaving the Mobile Data and Data Roaming settings off, and leaving the Sakura Mobile SIM card as my primary SIM for SMS and calls (even though it doesn’t have a phone number). The presence of this Canadian SIM card immediately seemed to toggle the phone camera’s clicking noises off again. And possibly due to how Virgin Mobile handles voicemails, as I think they tried to convert it into a text and send it to me anyway, I’m not getting an annoying Voicemail popup that I cannot remove, like I did with Telus on my prior trip.

I had picked up my Shinkansen tickets from Asakusabashi Station yesterday evening, although I did not scan them or anything at the time. I’m pretty sure I’m going to get to keep these tickets, but just in case I don’t, here’s a snapshot of them for the travel scrapbook.

I also found and took a picture of a giant brochure with Tokyo and surrounding area railways on it. I’ve actually been to a good chunk of these lines, especially in the central, south/southwestern, and north/northeastern portions. It sounded like a good thing to add to today’s scrapbook entry, so here’s a picture of it.

And Edmonton’s struggling so hard to reach 20 stations. Ganbatte Edmonton!

My lack of a mouse for my laptop has caused one very unexpected but noteworthy roadblock — it’s really annoying to use the draw kanji portion of Google Translate to get translations of things. It’s just so hard to draw with only a trackpad and without either a mouse or a touchscreen monitor. I’ll probably pick up a cheap and cute mouse somewhere at some point on my trip.

Here’s a picture of Tigey lounging and waving at the camera from my hotel room. He wanted to let my blog’s readers know that he’s doing perfectly well and there’s nothing to worry about, and he definitely doesn’t want to go home right this moment and sit in a plushie pile with Ally again. He also wanted to add this custom message to my blog entry.

Hello to Shiara‘s blog readers!
Everything is going perfectly fine here!
Looking forward to the rest of the trip!
Please don’t worry about me!

My owner is treating me very well, and
Every need of mine is being taken care of!

How sweet of you, Tigey! You’re the best!

Also, here’s a morning picture of the view outside my hotel window. It’s still gently raining this morning, and I probably should pick up an umbrella at some point in Kyoto.

For the moment though, I inquired at the front desk and found out that although checkout time was at 10, they were happy to hold my luggage for me for several hours after I had checked out, and also had umbrellas that they could lend me, so I checked out of the hotel early, grabbed an umbrella, and went to explore early morning Akihabara, just after 9 am. I learnt that a great many shops in Akihabara don’t even open until 10 am, and many not until 11 am or even noon, but I did hang out in the Akihabara Donki (Don Quijote) store and bought myself a cheap mouse that was on sale, as well as that Maroyaka banana milk drink that I’ve raved about on my previous blog. I had no idea that Donki sold that as well, so that’s two places in Tokyo now (Donki and Daiso) that sell it for sure. The packaging was a little different, but not enough to fool me.

After that, I wandered around a couple more stores without any further monetary incidents before heading to Akihabara Station, and then Tokyo Station from there, to take the shinkansen to Kyoto. I’d done this ride before, even if not on exactly the same train, so there wasn’t a ton new here, except that the Nozomi train actually had a lady with a little food cart plying her wares (mostly tea, as far as I could see, though I’m sure she had snacks and other drinks too) up and down the aisles several times during our trip.

I continued to strictly adhere to my policy that a shinkansen ride must always be accompanied by an ekiben bought from the departing station whenever possible, and this one was no exception. The ekiben I got was called Nihonbashi Makunouchi, cost 1300 yen, and was great!

I spent most of the trip playing more Persona 5 Royal on my Steam Deck, and before I could say phantom thieves, we were in Kyoto. Once in Kyoto, I was forcefully separated from the train ticket above, the smaller one of the two in the picture from earlier today, by the Shinkansen exit gates of Kyoto Station, so I was glad that my past self had decided to take a picture of that. I guess only JR Pass holders get to keep that, since the machine spits the JR Pass right back out when I used them to exit the stations on my last trip.

Anyway, I had two optons for getting from Kyoto Station to my residence, bus or train. Someone else in the UAlberta Discord server for this program that I was in mentioned a bad experience they had just had with bringing luggage onto a full bus though, so I opted for the train instead. I got to my residence, checked myself in at the front desk, and then took some pictures of the place once I finally got to my room. I idly wondered if this place was going to show up in my dreams since I would be here for a full month, and wondered whether to give it a name like Kyoto 401 and a hover text entry for it or not. We’ll see!