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Konnichiwa! This is Lj-san and Danny-san calling from the land of the rising sun, here are the results of the Tokyo Drury.
Our very first impressions upon arrival in Tokyo were, "Jesus Christ - this place is huge, we're gonna
need longer than a week to suss this out". This has been a constant theme of the entire trip so far...not having enough time!
It is safe to say that our first two days in Tokyo were spent womble style, underground as we tried to figure out the incredibly baffling metro system. By Wednesday we had kind of cracked it and by then we only had two days left.
Our first day was like most others, we headed out and tried to get our bearings......not so easy here as there are roughly 8 main districts to Tokyo, all of which resemble cities as big as Leeds in themselves and each one having its main attractions and sights.
Eventually though, after figuring out how to purchase a ticket for the metro we arrived in the main shopping
district of Ginza, which was everything you'd imagine Tokyo to be......high rise flashing neon buildings, designer
shopping for miles upon miles and tens of hundreds of sushi bars. It was here that we experienced our first
Japanese conveyor belt sushi meal. This was fun in itself as again, very few people here speak any English whatsoever, so the biggest challenge was how to actually 'get' our food. Basically chefs stand in the middle of a minature luggage carousel, shouting a lot, preparing the dishes, and thowing them out onto the conveyor belt,
whilst the customers sit around the outside grabbing what takes their fancy as it whizzes past. The food is put onto colour coded plates so naturally we were carefully selecting anything that appeared on a white plate as
this was the cheapest scran available. You eat as much as you want, stack up your dishes next to you and the waitress counts up what you've had at the end and you pay on the way out - the ultimate fast food. The whole
experience was thoroughly enjoyable and the food was fantastic (if you like your fish raw that is).
Apart from checking out the shopping district in Ginza, we also stumbled upon the Sony museum which was cool.
Dan got excited at the displayed Play Station 3 model and the super huge flat screen televisions in which we had to
sit down in front of every single model displayed. It's just as you'd expect here in Japan, they absolutely love their
gadgets and technology and utilise them wherever possible. The second most important and exciting moment of our first day arose when we 'luckily' found a 3 storey Lego superstore......containing all of the latest Star Wars range - hurrah said lj jumping in the air, who then had to be forcefully persuaded NOT to part with the 150 quid for the imperial star destroyer.
The following day on a simple quest to visit the nearby district of Shinagawa, which is a snip of a 10minute metro journey, we somehow ended up 70km south in Yokohama, which is a completely different city for goodness sake. Again luckily for lj it coincided with the location for the 2002 World Cup Final and so all ended well as another trip to an empty stadium commenced. Yes you can tell that our nose for travel is honed to a T after 3 months of hardcore backpacking - we seem to spend half of every single day just trying to find where we want to end up!!
No simpler was the 'Lost in Translation' area of Shinjuku, a place we had both looked forward to seeing since before booking the trip. To put it into context Shinjuku has 8 different subway stations and the one we chose to arrive at had no less than 60 different exits out onto the street. It was no great surprise really that we picked the wrong one for where we wanted to get to.
All this started to become a little bit frustrating after 3 days as we were quickly running out of time and it seemed that we weren't managing to get an awful lot done and it was becoming very tiring. A pick-me-up was needed so we headed directly for the Tokyo Dome
complex which housed a fantastic theme park and a couple of hours later, all of our frustrations were forgotton as we screamed our way round the scariest and steepest roller coaster we have ever seen.
The next day, half way through our trip our salvation was continued in the shape of the Tokyo Monorail - an absolute Godsend!
This is a brand new system which effortlessley loops around the swanky bayside area with stops at all the main attractions and sights.
As the tracks are raised above the roads, you get to see some of the city as you're commuting rather than just sitting in darkness in the metro underground where it seemed we had spent the best part of 3 days already. So the monorail was hugely welcomed and we had our first fully productive and fun day around Tokyo Bayside. The entire area seems brand new and is full of great neck straining buildings which are home to malls, museums, entertainment complexes, bars, restaurants etc. We even squeezed in a couple of hours in Joypolis,
the interactive amusement park run by Sega which turned out to be great fun. The most bizzarre thing about the bayside area is the Statue of Liberty which stands overlooking the bay in true New York imitation. Only the Japanese could take a symbol of American independence, copy it exact (except for size) and place it overlooking their capital.
We set alarms for bright and early the next morning so that we could visit the huge fish wholesale market, a must see event according to the Rough Guide. This was excellent and knocked the socks off any live fish market which we had seen in India or China. A great experience, filled with lots of noise, colours and smells, although we passed on the raw fish for breakfast at 9am.
After finally sussing out the transport game, we have tightly managed to do everything we wanted within our budget and have seen all the districts and various sights, temples, gardens etc.
Its been wonderful and a great if hectic week, but we are both now more ready than ever to quit the city break scene and get back to the road and to the proper travelling scene. Thailand is our home for the next 10weeks and we cannot wait to get cracking with it.
Will update again soon.
Take care x
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