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This is my station Minami Urawa, which is about 35 minutes north of Tokyo. It's quite a busy station, especially at rush hour.

Today is Wednesday and the time is 3:30 so I'm going to catch a commuter train to my evening job in a place called Shinjuku. It's not a straight journey. I have to change trains and it takes me about 45 minutes to get there.

These are the ticket gates. In a moment I will go through those and down the steps to the right, but before I do that I need a ticket.

I get my ticket here from the ticket machines. It costs me 290 yen one way to get to work, which is about $2.50. Some people use a pass or more recently their cell phones to get on the train.

Okay, I'm on the platform and this is my train - the blue line called the Keihin Tohoku in Japanese. The great thing about commuting in Japan is that the trains are very reliable. They run frequently and are nearly always on time. At certain times of the day a train arrives up to once every two minutes.

The train driver is just getting on, but as this one goes later I'm going to catch the one just pulling into the station. Well, time to go.

Minami Urawa has a lot of tracks because it is a big marshalling yard. Trains come here to be washed, repaired or just to wait until they are needed.

Anyway, we are picking up speed now. On the left is a wedding palace and coming up on the right is the school I used to work at. As I said before the trains here are quite reliable but sometimes things go wrong. Last week, strong winds caused some problems and many trains were delayed. This meant that the few trains that did come were overflowing with people. I had a very hard journey on that day.

This train is heading back to Minami Urawa. I'm looking forward to riding that back home in a few hours, so long as I can get a seat.

Anyway, I've work to do so bye....

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