All the Things: Monday

I have 112 pictures from yesterday, with no good internet connection to upload them. We did a LOT. I won a stuffed cat. I tried Japanese street food (it was a rice cake dipped in soy sauce but still.) Travis beat me at Mario Kart in a Shimbuya arcade, and there’s video proof. I almost bought a coat.

Starting from the beginning…

From Yokota to New Sanno:

First part of the morning was just getting our stuff from one hotel to another. We moved everything from Yakota AFB in Fussa to the New Sanno in Hiro’o, once again by train. Fortunately, we were on a Special Rapid line. The normal Rapid lines are not rapid. They stop at every single station, but the Special Rapid lines skip a few stations. You learn to love these lines in Tokyo.

There was a temple just down the street from the New Sanno — an island of calm in an otherwise active street.

Sky Tree – Shinjuku

The Tokyo Sky Tree is the tallest building in Japan. It’s in Shinjuku, about a 20 minute trip from the New Sanno.

You can get tickets to ride up to the viewing deck at 350 meters. There are a few lines involved but as with every line here, they’re windy and constantly moving. This line had a way cool ceiling.

The views from the deck are as incredible as you’d imagine. When you’re traveling in Tokyo primarily by train, it’s easy to fool yourself into thinking you have grasped some sense of space and size. You get your normal routes in mind, you know the stops, and things start to feel familiar. Hiro-o to Ebuyia to Shinjuku by way of Shibuya. Do it enough times and you can start to sound like the Californians.

When you step out into the viewing deck, all such illusions evaporate.

Tokyo would take a lifetime to learn. An eternal lifetime, because by the time you’d see everything, the things you saw first would have changed. But for us, we have a week, and a camera, and a selfie.

After the tower, we stopped by the Senso-ji temple. This guy (and characters like him) are all over the place. I like him.

Shibuya Crossing

Rivers of humanity all running together and then reaching the other side of the street, a ton of lights, fantastic amounts of noise. You have to see Shibyua crossing at night. I saw it in daylight today, and it didn’t have the same effect.

What you can’t see in these pictures is that there are about five streets that all intersect here. People stand on each of the corners, all of the pedestrian signals change to green at once, and it’s go time.

We walked through a few streets. One had a store with a coat that I loved, but it was only available in a medium. I said, “That’s too big,” to which Travis replied, “Well, it is a Japanese medium, not an American medium.” “Still, too big.”

Then we found the Sega arcade. 🙂

Travis REALLY wanted to play the drum game (more on that in tomorrow’s post) but it was busy. Instead, we found four connected Mario Kart games. There were two Japanese guys there, so we played a few games with all four of us. When they wanted to leave, we traded picture-taking: we took one of them together, and they took ours.

All the more I’ll say here, for now, is that there are go-pro videos of the races Travis and I had after that, and they’re pretty good.

When we’d had our fill of the Mario Kart game, we started to wander out. We needed to get to Shinjuku to meet up with a friend of Travis’s for drinks, but on the way out I saw one of those claw games. Actually a bunch of claw games, but only one appealed to me. It took two tries but I got something: a cartoon cat that we have named Kaiju.

New York Bar

We hopped on the train, got out at Shinjuku, and starting looking/walking/wandering for the Park Hyatt. Travis had wanted to take me here anyway, and when his friend suggested we meet there, he was excited. He wouldn’t tell me why. The hotel itself is like a lavish maze — there’s mirrors, wood, metal, and it’s hard to know what’s a wall, a hallway, an elevator…

But he’d been here before so we knew where we were going. And here’s the view from the New York Bar, on the 54th floor: