Tokyo! Day 1

We had a long weekend here with yet another Japanese holiday. This one was to promote physical health. Obviously I'm working on being healthy, and it's very important, but a national holiday for it? What's next? Oxygen Day?

This blog entry might read a little clunky, but I'm too exhausted to care.

Anyway, we seized the chance and skipped out of town Friday night on a night bus to Tokyo. We met up with Ayu's sister early Saturday morning in Shinjuku Station. After a bit of Marco Polo trying to find her sister in such a massive complex, we headed towards our place of dwelling for Tokyo, had some Subway and dropped off our bags. At about 9:00am or so we hit the road and started exploring.

The first place we went to was Harajuku. Harajuku has a reputation in Japan and the World for being THE place to see all sorts of gothic/lolita people. When we arrived it was still a little too early to see many people but we did get a chance to do some stress free shopping (before the immense rush). We spent about an hour shopping and then grabbed some lunch. We found a small Indian food stand on "Weird Street" and enjoyed some spicy curry and Indian beer for lunch. I liked Harajuku, but I'll have more comments on this in my next entry.

After this we boogied to Ikebukuro, which, as you guessed, has more shopping. Here all we really did was go to the biggest bookstore in Japan. The store has 9 floors of books and their English book selection is fairly decent (and a helluva lot better than anything we have in Kanazawa). I was happy to find two books that I was looking for: The Great Gatsby and 1984. I've started reading The Great Gatsby, but I've been too exhausted to make serious progress on it.

After Ikebukuro, we went to Shinjuku (again). We wanted to walk around the area but the weather was unforgiving. We decided we could find plenty to do in the station so we wandered around for a bit and found a cafe in the Keio shopping complex. Here I had one of my all time favorite ice creams: matcha ice cream. I enjoy it with azuki beans and the parfait was more than enough to recharge my batteries and alleviate my aching feet.

After browsing for a bit, we found a great grocery store in the station. As luck would have it, we arrived just as they were cutting up a giant Yellowfin Tuna. Wickedly awesome.

The final decision to make for the day was what to do about dinner. Being exhausted from walking all day, we decided to get some sushi, some beer and go back to our room. After eating it was bath time and bed time. The night bus is cheap, but it's brutal. I couldn't sleep all the way to Tokyo and by the time bed time rolled around, I was in a zombie-like state. I don't remember laying down or falling asleep that night.

Here are some pictures from day 1 (Saturday). I'll write day 2 up tomorrow and with some recommendations for anyone who may stumble across this blog and wants to see some stuff in Tokyo.



I took this picture for my brother to see. He spent many wonderful years (sarc.) working at Subway and thought he might like to see this.



I'm not an architecture junkie, but I love looking at tall buildings. Tokyo is loaded with all sorts of cool stuff like this.



This was just cool to watch. The guy cutting the fish has been doing this for about 25 years. He looks kinda young, but I guess he started at 6 years old. By the time they finished, they had an audience of about 100 people watching and waiting for fresh tuna.

Enjoy your evening wherever you are!