If You Wonder Where I've Been...

OK... so here's a pretty funny story. It involves trains, and I have no pictures of me in a train or on a train platform in Japan, so I've included one of Justin, actually, from when he and I were here in April of 2005.

For the trains here, you can either buy a ticket for each train ride you take, or you can use a pre-paid card, and that card just has money taken from its balance each time you swipe the card to get in/out of a train station. The "Suica" card is probably the most prominent of these cards, and I've used a Suica card for years.

When I was here in December, I plopped down about $50 to recharge my Suica card, as the balance was getting low. However, on this trip, the card readers would not accept my card. I've been too busy to deal with it, so this evening finally went to a ticket office to see what was wrong with my card. The nice young lady put the card through a special reader, and the reason the card has not worked is that they show me having gone IN to Shinagawa station back on December 21st, but have no record of me ever going OUT of the system!!! So... if you wonder where I've been, I supposedly have been wandering through the Tokyo train system for the past six weeks or so! I feel like Tom Hanks in that movie, stuck in the JFK terminal for forever. Instead, I was stuck in Shinagawa station. :-)

She cleared the anomaly on my card, and it's working again.