How you choose to pack your luggage, specifically clothing, will be determined by at least some of the following factors.
- Climate and time of year
- Purpose of travel
- Duration of travel
- Access to laundry facilities
- Aesthetic requirements
Posts from 2008-12 (Dec)
Mission side #06 – Choosing warm clothing and packing luggage
Moe side #03 – changing money for fun and orz
I did in the end change all my money to yen before leaving Australia. The overall trend for the Aussie dollar has been downwards, so I wasn’t too keen on risking things further by delaying. The gain would be small at best anyway.
One of the bosses at work had been to Japan recently to attend a wedding, and on the last day of work he slipped me a 1000yen note he had left over, as a sort of christmas present (right after hurling a small, foam soccerball at my head a moment earlier, mind you). We joked about how I’d be able to buy a can of coke with it, but the truth is it’s pretty substantial; that’s at least a couple of run-ins with UFO catchers in Akiba, or a bunch of drinks at train stations. Really can’t complain.
- 1,740 AUD -> 108,000 JPY
- 800 AUD -> 45,000 JPY
- 1000 AUD -> 59,000 JPY
- 1600 AUD -> 90,000 JPY
Walking around with the equivalent of five-thousand dollars in cash is a heady experience; the temptation to blow it all at a moment’s notice is hard to resist.
Mission side #05 – Running the mirror’s edge
Bruce Schneier’s blog picked up an amusing (and very silly) piece from the US Army recently, discussing the potential for terrorists to use web technologies such as Twitter to plan and coordinate attacks. Those damn terros are breathin’ mah air and drinkin’ mah water, the bastards!
Looking at what we’re packing, I thought it’d be fun to consider other data communication and storage possibilities. Law enforcement agencies are always on the lookout for contraband, but it tends to chase specific threats and doesn’t adapt well to digital information.
Mission side #04 – Exchange rates
Our finances have the potential to make or break this trip. The economic downturn has hit the exchange rates hard, so everything’s going to be about 50% more expensive than it would have been had we exchanged money a few months ago.
I’ve been using Google’s finance site to track the exchange rate, with the dollar vs. yen graphed out very nicely. It’s currently sitting around 60yen to the dollar, but in practice the rates offered by banks are about 2 to 2.5yen lower. The big four banks have a little variability between them, and NAB seems to edge out the others by a small margin (1yen or so). If you use a bank for currency exchange, you should make sure you visit a major branch. Not all branches carry significant amounts of foreign money.
It doesn’t seem to be well advertised, but NAB will actually change money for you even if you’re not an accountholder there; they need 100 points of ID (eg. drivers licence and medicare card) and they charge you an extra $5. Given that a difference of 1yen/dollar makes a $10 difference when you change $1000, this is good to keep in mind.
I also hear that some (all?) change bureaus at Sydney airport will waive the commission if you have ID to prove you work there, but you still have to deal with the fact that you’re changing money in a hopelessly tourist-y place.
Another suggestion that’s come up is to change money once we’re over there, it apparently works well for places like Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. Converting foreign money to local currency seems to be a universally depressing experience, so this could well work in our favour.
Mission side #03 – Airfare
The airline industry is a crazy mess. You can go to Qantas and find an economy airfare for about $2600. You can then go to Webjet and find a fare with Jetstar that’s about 30% less. なにこれ！？
It was quickly evident that Jetstar would be our best option, and by fiddling with the flight days using the interface on their site we were able to save a little more money. The reasonable fares were only available on certain days, presumably based on existing demand. Given this, we were practically forced to stay as long as we’re going to.
I suspect we’re travelling on an Airbus A320 for our flights. While their coverage of Jetstar is nil and configurations can vary on a per-airline basis, Seatguru still has some useful general information on the A320 and what you can expect (and spotting seats near the exits is always a good thing). The details they present are the type of thing I can really appreciate, so I like them.
You used to pick your seats at check-in time. This is kind of nice, because you can arrive early and get your pick of seats. Now, you do it when you book your tickets. Arguably more democratic, but ultimately less satisfying to my mind. I was rather disappointed to see just how quickly the seats had filled up; I suppose this is to be expected for discount airlines. We’ve now got a nice early flight on the morning of the 21st, I can hardly wait to see how cold it is.
Moe side #02
It took me a while to realise just how “chunky” our itinerary is, it’s quite literally carved into a few big blocks of contiguous days in one area. We spend well over a week in Tokyo to start with, something we didn’t do at all last time. While we’re planning things it makes the trip feel much shorter, as we’re not travelling every single day. It’ll sink in once we’re there though, but noone would dare suggest we’re going to get bored.
No, I think we can spend even more time in Akiba, and try to visit a wider range of maid cafes. Oh yeah, there’s touristy stuff to do as well; I do want to visit Tokyo Tower. Oh the irony, that it hasn’t been the target of a terrorist attack yet.
Some of the destinations are were already a given, like Shirakawa, while others happened to be convenient. Every easily-findable hostel was booked out for the night before new years eve, so the solution was to head towards Sendai. We hear there’s a nice lightshow on at that time of year, and it beats wandering the streets of Tokyo without a bed (which is what we plan to do on new years eve). I wonder if it’ll be like the last (non-OVA) episode of Boys Be…
Mission side #02 – Routes
An optimal solution for this would be creating plotting a graph of nodes and using Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm. This would even be Very Cool, but not as fun. With judicious use of the JR pass, the constraint is time, not money or distance, although the latter is somewhat related to time. Keeping this in mind, a rough route is chosen.
- Arrive in Tokyo
- Sendai for new years eve
- Return to Tokyo
- Sapporo, northernmost part of the country
- Tokyo
- Shirakawa
- Suwa
- Tokyo
Returning to Tokyo repeatedly sounds sub-optimal, but there’s little optimisation to be had between the northern and western regions anyway, and Tokyo is a very useful hub.
Moe side #01
It’s been a year or so since Ast and I last went to Japan, but here we are again. It’s an idea we’d been throwing around but didn’t seem resolved to pursue until it just fell into place. We decided on the spot that it should happen and that’s all there was to it.
The timing of this trip is centred around attending Comiket; for us it’s something like a mecca, so that fits nicely with our general goals. We visited Ariake last time, but under very different circumstances. Winter Comiket (冬コミケット) sits right between Christmas and New Year, so I reckon it’ll be quite a nice time.
In keeping with the pilgrimage theme, there’s plenty of other goals lined up. A large part of the trip is 北へ, heading north, to Hokkaido. It is here that stories like Kanon, Kita he and SaiKano are set, and we’ll visit the northernmost point of the country while we’re at it. Oh, I guess Sapporo is pretty well-known for a certain brewery… (「とある魔術の醸造所」)
Miasa was a prime location during the last trip. It’s tempting to visit again, but that can’t be justified. Instead, we’ll head further into the sticks and aim for Shirakawa.
I was really looking forward to meeting R-san there, too. Unfortunately she managed to break her leg and can’t go (うぐぅ～)
Mission side #01 – 14 days to departure
I leave for Japan two weeks from now on a 26 day deployment.
- Identify goals
- Determine a route for maximum efficiency
- Develop timetable
- Make transport arrangements
- Tune to fit constraints
- Create detailed localised plans
- Choose equipment