I stepped out of the express train that carried me from the airport to the Tokyo station.

It was a hot summer day. Unlike what I’ve been used to from the Californian dry climate, it was humid. Wet and sticky. Humid. Humid. Humid.

This was my first time here in the Land of the Rising Sun. You could say it was a dream come true. To be able to finally visit the country that was home to video game companies like Sega and Nintendo, which made the video games I was obsessed with in my childhood years.

I was here in Tokyo to study Japanese for six weeks in Mitaka, a city situated in the western part of the metropolis. And the very first challenge was to find my way to my homestay family’s house.

To get there, I needed to take the orange line. Also known as the Chuo Line.

This orange line was and still is one heck of a train line. The train back then was wrapped entirely in orange, but there were different types of services.

• Rapid
• Commuter Rapid
• Special Rapid
• Commuter Special Rapid

The Rapid service stops at every station, where as the other types would skip certain stations making those types more “rapid.” (To make things more complicated, the Rapid line itself skips 3 stations on weekends.)

In any case, if you were heading to a station that might be skipped, you ought to be careful of which service type your train was.

So I dragged my big suit case onto one of these orange trains. The orange trains would be what I commuted with between the school and my homestay. It would be the train that carried my newfound friends and me to the center of the city to get culturally shocked. These orange trains would carry me when I later come back to study for a year and work for many years more.

The orange train.

That’s where my adventure in Japan began, and this blog is where I share what I’ve stumbled upon.