Post #4 - October 15, 2012 - Tokyo, Japan

Patty here.

Just sitting here in our hostel's living room escaping the stench of our roommate on the third floor who smells like hasn't showered in months. Oh, the shortcomings of hostels have just begun. Today, my shower head broke off the hose so I basically finished the latter half of the shower with a hose. I'm sure it will only get more interesting from here as we enter China and head south!

Anyways, today was a really nice day all in all. It was a beautiful, sunny and hot day. We even stopped by a 7 eleven to pick up sun screen cause it was such a scorcher. But the day started out very very early. Jeff and I set our alarm for 6:00am so we could catch the Tsukiji Fish Market in action. After walking through half of Tokyo yesterday we some how woke up at 5:45am before our alarm went off. Unfortunately we had to pack all our stuff before we left for the day as we were moving to a new room today. That took up quite a bit of time and we are quickly realizing we have too much stuff... so we may shed some weight soon by getting rid of excess baggage. 

We ended up leaving the hostel just after 7am and headed straight to the metro. We were in quite a rush since things start wrapping up at the fish market at 8am. A sweet Japanese girl dressed in a typical Japanese school girl uniform, stopped and asked we needed help finding our way on the metro. She confirmed we were on the right path to the market so that was comforting. I think we finally have a handle on how the metro system works here. It's a real pain getting around on it because different companies own various lines so you're constantly jumping from line to line to get to where you wanna go. Plus almost everything is in Japanese!

So, after getting to our stop we jumped off and decided to walk 1km to the bay where the biggest fish market in the entire world auctions and sells all the sea creatures you can conjure in your mind in one enormous warehouse. Here are a few pics of the approx 100 pictures I took:

This for me, was the funnest thing we have done in Tokyo so far. It was amazing to see the sheer size of the warehouse and the variety of sea food!There are 100 aisles of booth after booth after booth of alive, dead, almost dead sea food, and workers preparing them, filleting fish etc. Jeff and I were laughing because of how annoyed most the workers seemed at us, be we didn't care much. One guy actually told me no pictures, but Jeff smirked at me and said "well there's a million others just like you buddy". There were a few workers there that smiled at us and seemed pretty proud of their work. We were pretty out of place being there though. Like Jeff said, it would be like people waltzing into your office and taking pictures of your work. Not to mention we were always in someone's way dodging these little motorized carts coming through every 2 seconds. Pretty sure we stunk like fish and blood on our way out but neither of us noticed much.

Next thing we did was stopped for breakfast at a cute little park nearby. Our original plan was to head straight to the Arashio Stable to see the sumo wrestlers practice. But, unforunately it ends at 10am so instead we headed to Odaiba Bay. It's an enormous man-made island off of Tokyo Bay where there's a ton of commercial buildings, malls, Sega's Joypolis, Tokyo's Disneyland, and mock Eiffel Tower and Statue of Liberty. Getting there was tough, but again we lucked out when a super sweet Japanese man who used to live in New Jersey saw us struggling and offered help. It looked like he was off to work or something but he spent 5 mins talking us through how to get to Odaiba Bay. We ended up taking the subway with him to our stop and chatted with him for awhile. Twice today, people have gone out of there way to help us. Once we got to our stop we bought tickets for the boat ride over to Odaiba Bay on this very large ship. It turned out to be just Jeff and I on the ship so we danced around like we owned it... seriously! It was quite fun :)

Odaiba Bay turned out to be interesting but exactly what we expected.... extremely superficial and commercialized. So, we walked around for a bit, had lunch (our first really good sushi rolls of the trip), explored some more and then headed home. The views from our train ride back to Tokyo were spectacular:

We finally booked our hostel for our trip to Mount Fuji. We also booked our hostel/hotel for Kyoto as well. So tomorrow, we leave for Mount Fuji at 11:10am via bus. We're pretty excited since it'll defnitely be a change of pace from the craziness that is Tokyo.

I miss everyone in Winnipeg and you're always in our thoughts. Technology definitely makes it feel like you're all very close to us though. So keep in touch! 

Patty