Japan or Bust

I pretty much passed out once we checked in to the new hotel so didn’t post anything yesterday. We’re at the new hotel. Tried to make it a light day and just did a short walk around Shinjuku and went to the Tokyo Metropolitan Goverment Building.

So after having the usual breakfast we checked out and went to the new hotel over at Shinjuku. The shinjuku area is the “red light district” of Tokyo and it’s very aptly named. Since we got to the new hotel early we just dropped off our luggage and walked around. You kept seeing a lot of places that had mug shots of lots of women… and men. So there were a lot of photo ops. Ate at moss burger. Ran into a local that knew pretty good english that was offering help and kept saying Shibuya is very uninteresting and told us to go to Asakasa and stuff. Well we get a little lost looking for the subway station but once we found it figured we would go to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building. It’s the tallest building in Japan… at 45 stories tall. You noticed that and my cousin really noticed that since he’s from boston, every building is really dense. Like 5 or 6 stories tall, and all buildings are like that. Shopping consists of multiple floors. So we did a little bit of shopping, including canned oxygen. Yep, at the 7-11, or whatever it’s called now, they’re starting to sell cans of oxygen. It doesn’t seem like it’s anything special to me. I jus got it for the fact that I could. Also stopped at a book store. It just amazes me how they’ll have more adult oriented games and novels within plain sight of kids that would just never happen in america. Another thing I saw that you wouldn’t see in america is an attendant at one of the subways helping an old lady up the stairs. Like grabbing her backpack and kinda lifting her up. You wouldn’t see that in America. People would be too afraid that they’ll fall and sue everyone down to the maker of the actual stairs.

So after a 20 minute walk from the subway we went got to the government building and took a bunch of pictures up there as well. Finally had to change the first set of batteries, so I guess the batteries are pretty decent.

We get to the new hotel, it’s a lot more spacious than the first one and actually has a view. Also has a massage chair that really isn’t all that relaxing or comfortable for long amounts of time. We had dinner at a Chinese restaurant that didn’t have pictures. So the lady pointed out the chicken menu and I just picked something random off of it without any clue as to what it was. Wasn’t neccessarily a good choice either, but I still ate all of it. It was funny the waitress asked what country we were from and we said America. She went something like “ohh, americans” and made gestures of very wide and very tall. That was rather amusing. It was also raining pretty heavily and she was saying the rain was cool and stuff. Came back to the hotel and I promptly passed out.

One thing that’s become odd is when we run into people that actually speak english. Like when we were in the Tokyo Metropolitan Building we ran into a woman from Vancouver and talked to her for a little bit. It’s only been 3 full days and I’m already not use to speaking english it anyone besides my cousin. Then, I can only barely speak any Japanese, so I’m really quiet now, for those of you that know me and know how I’m usually quiet enough as it is.  Another “wow, they think of everything” moments are the umbrella bags.  When we got into the hotel after the downpour or rain there is a bag for your umbrella so you don’t drip water all over the place.  You simple push the umbrella down into it and pull it out and your umbrella is in a bag for when you are walking around the hotel.  Just one of those small things that makes perfect sense, and you see those everywhere.  Or the umbrella stands outside of stores to leave your umbrella.  Of course that wouldn’t happen in the U.S. because someone would end up stealing them.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 25th, 2006 at 7:19 am and is filed under In Japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.