Prepping for Travel

Currently I’m preparing to leave for a week long trip to Tokyo! This was pretty spontaneous, we found out very late that we would be getting a month off over the new year in college. Me and friend were looking at getting away somewhere, and found some flights to Japan for an incredibly low price that was too good to not go for. And so here I am now!

A lot of my prep has been pretty simple, filling out some forms and getting my documentation ready. But on the other hand I’ve been setting myself up for a long flight, as well as my camera setup for the 5 days we’ll be in Tokyo.

I’ve got a ton of movies downloaded for the flights there and back, featuring some appropriate selections like Tokyo Drift and Shin Godzilla (I saw Godzilla Minus One last week and it’s incredible, highly recommend seeing). Especially threw in Killers of the Flower Moon as I can’t think of another time when I’ll be sitting down and bored for over 3 and half hours.

I also want to bring my Kobo with me for more relaxing entertainment. I have some books I need to continue, like David Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything and Don Norman’s Emotional Design (though I’m not sure how I feel about it yet). But I was also recommended some fiction in V.E Schwab’s Villains series by a friend.

Choosing a camera to bring was pretty difficult for me. I wanted to bring my Sony DSC-S85, as I bought it for travel, however it’s limited on storage (roughly 128mb!) and the battery is very poor on it. The alternative was a very hard to control point and shoot, or my expensive and a little bit boring Sony a6000 mirrorless. My friend ended up commissioning me to do a photoshoot of them out in Tokyo, so I used it as a chance to buy some upgrades to the S85. I started with a new battery alongside a quick charger, then attempted to buy some more storage. I say attempted because I discovered afterwards that the “Pro” memory sticks weren’t supported by my model, despite being identical. Thankfully, I can lower the resolution to get about 130 photos out of the 128mb of storage, and my friend is bringing their laptop so I’ll be able to offload my photos if I need more space (which is likely to happen).

I still have a bit more prep to do. I’ve lost a decent amount of my Japanese in memory over the past few years, so I’d like to write up a few pages in my notebooks with guides on numbers, common phrases I may encounter etc. My hiragana and katakana recognition is currently around 50%, so I should probably get that up a bit too.

We don’t really have a plan down, nor have we booked tickets to go to any big tourist spots. I think the plan is just to have a good time, enjoy the food and see what happens! I have some things I want to try pick up in second hand shops over there like a gameboy camera and a famicom disk, and of course a bunch of souvenirs for myself and my friends who are big fans of Ghibli movies and such!

Only a couple of days to go, can’t wait! - Dook