Post #3 - October 14, 2012 - Tokyo, Japan

Jeff here. Today was a walking day. Our plan was to head over the the Tokyo Sky Tree first thing in the morning to beat the rush. We went there yesterday and the line up was immense, so we had wanted to avoid that. We didn't. We arrived shortly after 8pm, which is when it opens, and the line was already literally hundreds of people long. That being said, I don't think I've ever been in a faster moving line in my life. We couldn't have been standing in line more than half an hour before buying our ticket and heading up the elevator. We decided against paying the extra charge to go to the very top level, which turned out to be a good choice. The day was unfortunately pretty foggy and cloudy so the view wasn't as nice as usual.

After we descended, we grabbed breakfast at the food court in a shopping complex below the Sky Tree. We had some delicious croissants (one had chocolate chunks in it!) and some mediocre noodle beef soup and tempura. 

After this, we headed back to our hostel to grab some jackets because it had started raining, then picked up some fruit at a nearby supermarket. We found some pretty interesting things in there, but nothing wildly different from what we have at home. 

From there we decided to walk to the Tokyo Imperial Palace (also sometimes known as Edo Castle), which probably wasn't the best decision. It took about 1.5 hours to walk there and our Lonely Planet book did not come with an adequate map of Tokyo to make a walk like that very much fun. Most of the time we had no idea where exactly we were, we only knew that we thought we were walking in approximately the right direction. But once we finally arrived, the Imperial Palace was definitely worth visiting. It seems that many of the structures that once existed have been destroyed, but the moat and walls are largely intact and speak to the massive size of the complex. It must have been quite a site in its prime.

We walked through the palace for about 1.5 hours in intermittent rain (thank goodness Patty had run back to our hostel to grab two umbrellas!) before we headed out to do some must-needed trip planning. An Australian couple the day before recommended that we stay at Kawaguchi-ko near Mt. Fugi and had suggested taking a train. After quite a lot of searching in the nearby underground station, we ended up traveling to Shinjuko train station where, after some research, we instead booked bus tickets to Kawaguchi-ko. We leave on Tuesday morning.

Shinjuko is a very loud and bustling area of Tokyo, very different from where we're staying, in Asakusa. The crowds of people were incredible and every building had lights hanging off of it. Very cool, but we left Shinjuko happy that it wasn't the area of town we were staying in.

We wandered around Shinjuko for quite some time looking for a restaurant recommended by our Lonely Planet book. When we finally found it, it was closed. We consulted our book again and there is was: closed on Sundays! So we wandered around for a while longer looking into various restaurants, driving each other crazy with our indecisiveness, until we finally found one that fit our nebulous requirements. And it actually turned out to be really good! It was a fairly simple meal, but we were starving and it was pretty tasty. Here's a pic from halfway through:

Once we were done eating, we headed straight back to the hostel to do some more booking of hostels and our bus trip from Tokyo to Kyoto. This was mostly successful, but the hostels are going to get back to me on their availability.

It's currently nearly midnight and we wanted to be at the fish market by 7am tomorrow morning. Time for bed!