Day 1 in Tokyo
On our first full day in Tokyo, we woke up thinking it was Saturday but subsequently realised it was Sunday. I'm sure part of our confusion was due to having crossed the International Date Line during our flight and thus having leapt forward in time, but the bigger issue was the data entry error we had made in our trip planning spreadsheet months ago. This caused us to think we were arriving in Tokyo on Friday afternoon (the same day we left LA), when it was in fact Saturday afternoon. The most annoying part of this was that we had accidentally booked our Tokyo accommodation a day earlier than we needed it! It's now Thursday and we've been confused all week... yesterday morning we almost set off for our Thursday morning plan before realising it was only Wednesday! Anyway, here's what we got up to on Sunday...
For lunch we tried out the ready-made "konbini" meals at the local grocery/ convenience store near our AirBnb. These are very popular in Japan. We took them back to our apartment to heat and eat, and they were quite delicious!
After lunch, we rode the train to Shiro-Hige's Cream Puff Factory, famous for making Totoro-shaped, cream-filled pastries. (Totoro is an animated movie character.) Tokyo has quite a lot of "character cafes" where the food is designed to look like pop culture characters, and this was one I'd saved in Google Maps ages ago so I wouldn't forget. I'm really pleased we got there, as our Totoro cream puffs were super cute and delicious!
Next we rode to Shibuya Station to see the famous Shibuya Scramble Crossing. Apparently this is the busiest pedestrian crossing in the world, with up to 3000 people crossing every two minutes and (according to Wikipedia) "almost no loss of foot traffic at midnight or early morning". It didn't seem quite that busy when we were there on Sunday afternoon (though the crossing is supposed to be busier on weekends than on work days), but you can make up your own mind...
Of course, we left our vantage point in the station and crossed the road a couple of times ourselves...
We wandered around Shibuya for a while, checking out several shops. One was a bookshop, where we bought a couple of gifts for people back home...
We also went to a shop called Mega Don Quijote. Apparently it's a super-sized version of a Japanese chain store called Don Quijote — something along the lines of Big W. It was extremely crowded, but we found lots of interesting products!
We saw some street karts in Shibuya. This is a popular tourist activity. We'd love to do it, but the boys are too young to be allowed!
Here's a pic of the crowded train on the ride home. They've only been this crowded a few times — we end up getting seats more than half the time. We love the trains here... they're so easy to navigate, well-integrated with Google Maps, fast, frequent, reasonably priced, on time (mostly) and extremely quiet (especially the passengers)!
To illustrate the quiet train thing, here's a recording I took during a train ride yesterday. The voice you can hear is the announcer over the loudspeaker (though on some trains this is more like a quietspeaker). There's literally not a sound from any of the passengers!
And for contrast, here's a recording I took in Italy when we were on the train to Pompeii. The only reason there isn't much talking is because nobody could hear themselves over the boy busker hand-drumming along to his dad's boom box accordion music! I wonder what would happen if someone tried to do this on a train in Japan...
Once we got back to our local train station on Sunday night, we tried out a local fast food chain called Mos Burger. I have to say the price of food here in Japan has been a very pleasant surprise. We are back to eating out twice a day as a result! On this night we got a burger each for a total of $15 AUD. Most of our lunches and dinners have only cost $20-40 AUD for all four of us!
And that was our first day in Tokyo!