Tokyo
The first thing I noticed about Japan was that it was a lot hotter than I'd expected. Sweltering on Monday and Tuesday and today really rainy. Didn't feel any earthquakes
I arrived at Narita International Airport and I was met by one of my best friends from school, Anna. Lucky she was there as the train from the airport was a bit confusing.
Tokyo is really funny. If I could describe it one word then that word would be 'weird'. First of all the toilet in my hotel room had a heated toilet seat! A heated toilet seat. Talk about unnecessary! It also had a few options to chose from for washing yourself when you were done on the toilet. Jets of water from all sorts of directions. Needless to say I think I will stick with toilet paper!
There were also some other toilets that were so high-tech that I couldn't figure out how to dispense the soap.
Tokyo is also huge. I went to a tower (not the Tokyo Tower, but another one whose name I have already forgotten) because apparently it boasts a similar view to Tokyo Tower, but it's free to go up! Yay. From the top, it was just buildings for as far as you could see. I'll say it again, Tokyo is huge. You can see Mt Fuji from this building but I missed it since it was so cloudy and smoggy. Didn't matter too much as I saw it when I came here with my parents a while ago! Would have been nice though
I had lunch at some place where you put some coins into a machine, pressed a button to pick what you wanted and then gave the ticket to the guy. Since I can't read Japanese I just picked what the guy in front of me picked. Then everybody goes to eat at a long bar, and everybody eats really fast! A few slurps and all the noodles are gone. After this I think I went back to the hotel and watched some tennis haha, since I'd flown in and basically gone straight out I was tired
That night I met Anna and some of her friends in Shibuya for dinner. It wasn't expensive, and it was great food. The entire menu was in Japanese again so I only vaguely knew what I was eating but luckily Anna knew!
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Foreword!
This is yet another blog that I am compiling from memory - I never did put a scrapbook of this trip together so I will have to string everything together going off the emails I wrote while I was there. So bear with me!
Here was the plan: Melbourne - Singapore - Tokyo (Japan) - New York - Washington DC - East Berlin (PA) - Boston - Niagara Falls (Canada) - East Berlin - Washington DC - New York - Tokyo (Japan) - Singapore - Melbourne.
Phew!
At $100 a night this would usually be way out of my price range. Apparently this was a discounted rate, anyway it seems I didn't have much choice. I asked a friends dad who used to be a travel agent to find somewhere for me to stay while I was in Tokyo, somewhere cheap-ish and in a convenient location.
The location was very convenient and apparently the price isn't bad for Tokyo. I guess some things are just expensive! Anyway the room was nice and cute because it was so small! Really narrow, they are really stuck for space in Japan (which is why I didn't want to stay at friends' places, because I knew it'd be a real hassle for them - anyway one was really far out and the other was far-ish out and she was already sharing a tiny room with her sister).
It was so funny, I don't know how ergonomical the door to the toilet was, anyway it was really funny and it had all these strange settings like heated-toilet seats (see my blog entry!) Also I could hear the guy next door singing in the shower which was hilarious because it was all in Japanese! Karoke, haha!
But seriously it was a very good hotel, it had a tv that you could watch from bed and lots of interesting channels and all the usual stuff. Very close to Shinagawa train station which was probably the best thing about it. Very comfortable! Thumbs up.
