Underground

So the past couple weeks I've been pretty busy putting my life here together, getting a bank account, alien registration, health insurance, cell phone, looking for Apartments etc. and working. So I haven't had time to really do all that much that's cool and worth writing and reading about.

So instead of writing about something interesting I'm going to write a little bit about my commute. I sent an email to a few of my co-workers saying how many stairs and escalators I had to go up and down during my commute, but it elicited no reaction leading me to believe that you can't convey with words how ridiculous some of these stations are. So here is a photo tour of my commute through Roppongi and Shinjuku stations. Sorry if the pictures are a bit blurry I was trying to take them in a discrete way during rush hour while on my way to work.

First up descending down into Roppongi Station to get on the Oeido line, represented by the pink circle.

A hundred feet underground or so I finally get to the gates, where I swipe my Passmo (Tokyo's charlie card)

Then I keep going down...

Then I get on this train!

I get off at Shinjuku Station. Here my route is fairly simple but I have to go up two GIANT escalators each maybe 100ft of vertical.

Then I have to go back down some stairs to get on the Keio line.

Where people wait in orderly lines to get on the train. There are basically four blue lines on the floor creating 3 columns leading to each train door. People line up in the two columns at the edges so that people leaving the train can go through the middle column. Everyone observes the lines nobody cuts.

Then I arrive at the fairly boring train station by our office, only a couple flights of stairs.