Day 2

Konichi wa!

Ahhh Japan, land of the rising sun and air conditioners. It’s about 10 am local time and I just woke up after a 5 hour sleep. Yesterday has been pretty tough. We’ve been spending our time in Shinjuku and later on in Kabuki-Cho which is supposed to be the red-light-district over here. But don’t get too excited as nothing really happened.

 

Shinjuku

Shinjuku is great, it’s home of quite a few skyscrapers and is the cleanest place I’ve seen from all the world metropols I’ve been to. It also houses Tokyo’s government building which is probably the largest building in this area. Alot of tourists go up to 45th floor and are welcomed with a very beautiful all-around view of Shinjuku and when the weather’s playing along you can even see Mt. Fujisan.

 

Tokyo Government Building

Both towers are open and I recommend seeing both as you can see differnt parts of the city alot clearer and if you happen to be there on a monday that’s the 2nd or 4th monday that month, you can even check out the Northtower at night until 23.00. There’s a very comfy café in Northtower if you want to rest your eyes for a bit .

 

Park Hyatt (left), view from Tokyo Government Building

 

View from Tokyo Government Building

 

Martinofant

I’m kinda getting lazy and unpatient here, Shibuya’s Starbucks is waiting for me! So please excuse me for the abrupt cut off. Anyways, we’ve been three (normal) bars in the red-light-district and had a few drinks. It’s very expensive and I didn’t think it was worth it but we did it anyway.

The last bar was pretty nice, a small old-rock joint which lets you decide what to play. Very nice but not many people.

 

Kabuki-Cho

 

My new mobile phone strapband

Day 1

Good news everyone!

I’ll spare you the boring “on my way to Nippon” stories and instead fast forward to our arrival at Narita Airport. Right, first thing first. Before going through arrival procedure here’s a nice picture of the Boeing 777 we spent 11 hours on.

Boeing 777

Welcome to Nippon

Some nice and warming welcome words – unlike in the US you can actually take a picture of that without being scolded by security. The arrival procedure was fairly simple and everyone was very kind. I’m really impressed with how polite these japanese people are – we were able to book our rides to Kyoto and Kobe without any problems.

After that we bought some reserved seats for the NEX (Narita Express, train towards Tokyo) which was unecessary because the whole train was kinda empty. It took us about an hour to arrive at Shinjuku Station which you can see in the picture below. Amazed by the beautiful view we were lost for a few minutes before taking a very good guess which direction to take towards our hotel at Shinjuku Higashi. The hotel looked just like on Google Maps so it was rather easy to spot.

Shinjuku Station

I have to say I’m very impressed with Tokyo so far. The air actually smells good and the streets are very clean – at least those that I’ve seen so far. If you’re an avid anime watcher then it’s rather easy to imagine how Tokyo and its small side streets looks like – pretty much exactly like pictures in those. Here’s a little example.

Sidestreet

Eventhough Tokyo is filled with countless people we managed to see the same girl three times already – well she is a foreigner too so it isn’t hard to spot her. Here’s a picture taken on a random street. Nothing compared to the very famous crossing in Shibuya which you can see below.

Lots of people

Bad picture of Shibuya Crossing

First day was pretty tiring, we’ve been to Yoyogi Park near Harajuku Station and checked out a small part of Shibuya before hitting the bed. I promise better pictures of Shibuya and the crossing the coming days. Here’s a video of a bird playing with some foreign kids in Yoyogi Park which I think is very cute.

Good day is good

Why hello thar!

Isn’t today just perfect? As you might know I’m on my way to Japan, two more days until my departure from VIE and today everything worked out as desired. Best-case scenario hit. Not only did I manage to get some real good sleep last night, nope also my new bank card came today so I’ll be able to use the Japanese ATMs over there. I was really worried about that because – the lazy bum I am - I ordered the new card only a week ago. Way too late to arrive in time usually. So before hitting the statistics course I went to pick up the new card and its pincode which - lucky me again – is very easy to memorize.

Afterwards I went to the bank again to get some Yen for my trip, poor lady there had to count alot as you can see in the picture below.

Twohundredsixtythousand Yen

I’m glad time flew by this quickly because I was looking forward to this trip ever since we had the idea of doing it.  It’s very convenient that our hotel rooms in Tokyo have internet access so I’ll try to update this blog on a daily basis. (I really hope it’s a 100Mbit line because my jaw will drop so hard ).

Before I close this opening post, here’s a picture of our JRail Pass cover. That’s an expensive train ticket that is valid for a week and allows you to travel by using JRail.

JRail Pass