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London to Tokyo!
Well after the tears had been wiped away, we started to feel very excited about our trip, the journey to Heathrow flew and we were bang on time for checking in (3 hours before!) That was until we arrived at the Virgin check-in desks, much to our distress we discovered that we had to queue for over an hour and a half to check in because it was any desination check-in! That meant we had an hour to eat, buy some perfume and buy a camera!!!
We ended up having to take our flip flops off and run to catch the flight, last call appeared on the board and we were 20 minutes away from the boarding gate! Needless to say we were slightly worried and out of breath but as you can tell from our photos we made it on time!
It was lovely to be met by Andres at the airport and he was pleased to see a friendly face from home. We headed to his house in Shinkamwikng, it was very humid but the sun was shining! We met his friends Thomas and Gavin. Gavin was our tour guide for the day poor lad, because we were pretty miserable and Jet lagged, we managed to go to electrical town which wasn't that impressive! We also managed to fall asleep and miss our stop on the Train! We headed to Japan's version of Carnaby street which was pretty cool and trendy!! Lisa tried her first Japanese meal which didn't agree with her (no need to go into detail)!!! We decided to have an early night so we were bright and breezy for the next day!
We headed off on our own into Tokyo, we did quite well on the trains especially because of the language barrier and the fact that there are not many signs anywhere!! We got on a really cool train that had two floors, we were a little naughty as we weren't allowed in double floor carriage, as we were getting off we spotted a ticket man so we had to run to the other end of the carriage to get off, it was scary stuff but worth it! We managed to find the imperial palace where the Emperor lives, we weren't allowed in but the grounds were very pretty and it was nice to get some peace in such a busy and noisy city! We also stumbled across the Diet Building, no-body seems to know what this is but it looked nice! Unfortunately Clair felt ill that evening, which was probably because we left the air-con on the night before, so she went to bed early! Which meant I went out with Andres for his friends birthday! It was one of the best nights out ever, I met loads of people (would you believe some were from finsbury park). We headed to traditional Japanese Karaoke were you paid 20yen for all the drink you can drink and lots of ice-cream! It was crazy we got our own room with a book of songs the size of the yellow pages, we missed the last train so had to get the 1st one home which was around 6.00am!!!!
We slept in quite late the next day but we managed to drag ourselves into town to do a tour that Andres' friend Chris who had lived in Japan for two years recommended! We got the train to the Asakusa market & temple, which was lovely, really felt like we were in Japan as it was not so commercial and westernised! We then went on the Tokyo riverboat tour! There were so many bridges and funky buildings, everything is lit up. We reached Tokyo bay when it was dark, rainbow bridge looked beautiful and so did the Fuji building which we got the lift up to the 24th floor, the sights were amazing! We also had our picture taken with the Statue of Liberty, very bizarre but they seem to love everything American! We tried some susi, Clair loved it but I wasn't so keen, just glad I had tried it! We went for a couple of drinks with Andres and his friends in his local bar, it was good to meet different people!
We got to bed quite late that night and set our alarm for 4 am so we would have plenty of time to get to the airport. Unfortunately the alarm didn't go off and for some strange reason, I woke up at 6:10am, I thought because I didn't have my glasses on I was seeing things but no we were running late!!! We have never been ready so fast and we made it to the train station in half an hour, thankfully we got our flight on time, we hope this is not going to be a running theme to our trip!!!
Anyway until next time - Missing you already
Love From
Lisa & Clair
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