Advertisement
Painfully our alarms went off at 3:30am. We made it to the airport, checked our bags, and went through customs with enough time to grab breakfast. In an effort to stay authentic, I ordered a Teh-O (Kopitium tea with only sugar) along with my apple turnover and Fred had a beef soup with his Kopi-C. We did see a funny restaurant in the airport- instead of Church's Chicken, they have Texas Chicken! Fred exchanged our left over Singaporean dollars at the airport exchange office so he had a starting cash point for Japan. Since it didn't work out perfectly, we were able to grab some chocolaty snacks for the flight. With 6 1/2 hours at my disposal, I utilized the flight to develop Tokyo itineraries and catch up on journal entries.
With a quick pass through customs requiring a photo and finger print entry, we officially entered Japan! Maneuvering through the airport we found some directions to the right train to take us to the area of Tokyo that our hostel was located. Due to it being an Express Train, we had to do a transfer at Aoto train station. Shuffling off and waiting around, we must have looked lost
because a cute little old Japanese man came over and tried to help us out. It was a challenge because he didn't speak a word of English and my elementary Japanese did little to communicate our situation. He was persistent though and didn't move from our side until we were on the right train and he could point out the right stop on the train map. I was proud of myself for being able to count along with him as he figured out how many stops were before ours. Then thankfully I had downloaded the instructions from the hostel website, so we were able to figure our way out of the maze of a station to get to the right part of the street to simply walk over to our hostel.
Checking in we lucked out and got our own room, that is almost as good as a hotel! We even have our own bathroom (in fact, we basically have the whole floor to ourselves). Starving from our adventures and only enjoying airplane food after the tasty breakfast, we headed out to explore Asakusa (the area of Tokyo our hostel is in). JACKPOT! We ended up in a cute
historic part of town that has a breathtaking Buddhist shrine surrounded by shops and stands. Per our hostel's recommendation, we stopped in for a Sushi dinner. It was like you see in the movies! It had a conveyor belt that the plates of sushi transported around and around for you to pick up the plate with those you wanted to try. Lucky Fred and his larger stomach had about 10 plates to my 4. Everything was unbelievable - and a bit unique. You could also serve your own cup of green tea by placing in the tea in a little cup and using a hot water spiket in front of you. The coolest part was the check, they had RFID labels on every plate that represented the cost of the plate (which customers knew based on the plate color) and this handheld mechanism would scan the stack of plates and calculate the total. They server then put the total on a digital card which you brought up to the cashier who's computer read the amount from the card.... WOW!
The rest of the evening we explored the area and the Sensoji Temple/Asakusa Shrine. We were just in awe of
the differences in buildings and goodies seen in all the shops. I had us both pick up Taiyaki (sweet fish shaped bread similar to a waffle filled with goodies, like chocolate!) to enjoy on our walk. Unfortunately, most of the shops were closing up that late at night so we headed back to the hostel to plan for the days to come.
I spent some time with the hostel front desk gathering some details on fun stuff we could do and then the rest of the evening planning out our days to come. Poor Fred is patiently dealing with my anal planning tendencies... but it should be worth it being able to fit in as much as we can during our trip!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.127s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 12; qc: 27; dbt: 0.0357s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb