{"id":1656,"date":"2007-08-14T08:48:51","date_gmt":"2007-08-14T08:48:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2007\/08\/14\/japan-travel-checklist\/"},"modified":"2007-08-14T08:48:51","modified_gmt":"2007-08-14T08:48:51","slug":"japan-travel-checklist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2007\/08\/14\/japan-travel-checklist\/","title":{"rendered":"Japan Travel Checklist"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In just a few days, Kate and I are leaving for Japan, for a couple of weeks of tourism before <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nippon2007.us\/\">Worldcon<\/a>. Most of the important things have been done&#8211; we&#8217;ve got tickets, and hotel reservations, and JR Pass vouchers, and that sort of thing. Things remaining to be dealy with (a partial list):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Medication. What a drag it is getting old&#8211; when I went in 1998, I didn&#8217;t take anything other than Advil and Aleve, but now, Kate and I rely on a variety of prescription medications. We need to pick up refills of our various drugs, and copies of the prescriptions are supposed to be in the mail to us&#8211; I&#8217;m told it helps in clearing Customs. Of course, nobody can tell you exactly what medicines are difficult to import&#8211; does anybody know anything about bringing Nexium, Protonix, Zantac, Flexeril, and Allegra into Japan?<\/li>\n<li>Flipping great wodges of cash. There are still a lot of places that don&#8217;t take credit cards in Japan, so one way or another, we&#8217;re going to want to have a substantial amount of cash. I&#8217;m not entirely sure whether it&#8217;s better to take a large amount of cash on the plane in dollars, and change it in the airport, or just hit cash machines. Probably a mix of the two, but I need to spend a little time shuffling money around our various bank accounts and so forth.<\/li>\n<li>Portable maps. We&#8217;ve got a stack of guidebooks, but they&#8217;re kind of bulky, so I need to spend a little time locating good bilingual subway maps for Kyoto and Tokyo\/ Yokohama, and printing copies to take with us.<\/li>\n<li>Language skills. Listen to more <a href=\"http:\/\/www.japanesepod101.com\/index.php\">JapanesePod101<\/a> podcasts to try to remember what little Japanese I ever knew (&#8220;Eigo ga hanashimasu ka?&#8221;). In particular, I need a refresher on timekeeping, for things like reserving seats on the <i>shinkansen<\/i>. Also, I need to find a compact printable <i>katakana<\/i> cheat sheet&#8211; I used to know them pretty well, but I&#8217;m way out of practice.<\/li>\n<li>Tourism planning. I sketched out a really rough itinerary months ago, when we were deciding where to go, but I should really flesh that out with more details now that I know where we&#8217;re staying, and figure out things like what attractions are open what days.<\/li>\n<li>Packing. I&#8217;m not going to attempt to drag three weeks&#8217; worth of clothing on planes and trains, because God, that would suck. I figure 8-10 days worth of stuff, and then we&#8217;ll pay for laundry service in one of the hotels (we&#8217;re staying in big, fancy, Western-style hotels for most of the trip). I need to figure out what clothes I&#8217;m taking, and how I&#8217;m going to get them into reasonable size suitcases.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That ought to keep me occupied for the rest of the week&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In just a few days, Kate and I are leaving for Japan, for a couple of weeks of tourism before Worldcon. Most of the important things have been done&#8211; we&#8217;ve got tickets, and hotel reservations, and JR Pass vouchers, and that sort of thing. Things remaining to be dealy with (a partial list): Medication. What&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2007\/08\/14\/japan-travel-checklist\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Japan Travel Checklist<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","category-sf","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1656\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}