Big City. Really Big City.

Friday, July 28, 2017 – Tokyo, Japan

The flight from the US to Tokyo was long but uneventful, so I will start with arrival in Tokyo. We arrived on Friday afternoon and took an airport bus to Shinjuku. Shinjuku is an area of Tokyo that is home to the busiest railway station in the world, Shinjuku Station, and many skyscrapers including the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building. It is a vibrant city within a city and was the perfect place for us to home base as we explored Tokyo.

The bus stop was at the Hilton, which was only a few blocks from the apartment we had reserved on AirBnB for the next few days. The subway may have been a little quicker, but we got to see the city from the bus as we made our way to Shinjuku. The sheer size of Tokyo was astounding. At that time the Tokyo prefecture had a population of 13.7 million and the metropolitan area population was 38 million – the largest metropolitan area in the world.

Our apartment was very nice. It was small, but very clean and functional. It had a combined living and kitchen area and a separate bedroom where we slept on futons on the floor. It was definitely a better experience than staying in a western-style hotel.

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Despite our travel-weariness we were eager to explore, so we set out around Shinjuku. Aaron stayed in Shinjuku on one of his previous trips so he knew the area pretty well. The area right around Shinjuku Station has a lot of shops, restaurants, bars, karaoke, and pachinko parlors. Pachinko is a gambling machine, kind of like a slot machine but also quite different. We enjoyed our first evening absorbing the sights, sounds, and smells of a new city and a new culture. We found a ramen shop and had ramen with pork belly for dinner, then stopped at a grocery to pick up coffee for the next morning. By then we were very tired so we went back to the apartment to rest up for the next 10 days of adventure.

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