Meeting the Carolyne
It was sad to leave India after only 6 weeks, so much more to see and do there, but our flights had been booked for a while and Japan was calling.
From Narita airport we headed into Tokyo on the cheap train into Ueno, where Alex had booked us into what the Lonely Planet apparently calls ‘the cheapest accomodation in Tokyo’, and in fact it was only 4 times as expensive as our last hotel in Delhi, although somewhat smaller.
grabbing machine professionals
We headed back onto the metro to have a look around Ginza, which felt a lot like a deserted Oxford Street, in fact, compared to India the whole of Tokyo felt deserted, maybe it is the recession or something. We were also already missing all the beeping, tuk-tuks, cows and bare-bottomed children. Most strange of all was that you could stand outside a shop looking at a map and no-one would come outside to implore you to come and ‘take a look’.
Second day in Tokyo was more business like, we had to head down to the Chinese embassy to lodge our visa applications, this was VERY straightforward, we haven’t picked up our passports yet, but the whole process took no more than ten minutes, and all of the supporting documentation that we had printed out the night before was waved away as being unnecessary.
When we came out of the embassy it was snowing, actually snowing, which boded well for our snowboarding trip a couple of days later. We spent the rest of the afternoon in the Tokyo Midtown mall at Roppongi Hills, we looked at all the ridiculous shops selling designer puppy wear, and diamond encrusted mobile phone jewels. And we had a great lunch in one of the many restaurants with lunch time special menus for around 1000Yen. Also visited FujiFilm’s free display, which at the moment was a collection of photos of National Parks from all over the world. It seems that there are still lots more places we want to visit…
And so to Carolyne Day. We met up at Ueno station and took Carolyne to her prison cell-like room in the hostel. The Japanese style rooms there are really not that big at all, and, although they don’t have bars on the windows they are a bit institutional. We then headed straight out to Ryogoku, where we had read there would be sumo wrestlers roaming the streets. We didn’t see any, although Carolyne claims she saw ‘a fat girl’. So, we headed into the Edo Museum. A big dimly lit affair, that covered Tokyo’s history from formation to the present day. Reasonably interesting, and warmer than hanging around outside.
Final district for the day was Asakusa, also known as Electonics Town. There are indeed lots of shops selling all manner of electronicy things, we most enjoyed going into the amusement arcades and watching the grabbing machine professionals doing a little dance as they collected their umpteenth manga figurine of the night with great skill.
Another good and cheap meal was had before we headed for an early night ready for our bus trip to Hakuba and the mountains in the morning.
