To get there, me and Thom took the night bus from Nagoya which takes about 6 hours (boo) but is kitted out like the first class cabins of planes, with reclining seats, and blankets and little slippers to wear (yay). We got to Tokyo about 6am and met up with Kari, then needed somewhere to go to refresh ourselves and get ready for the day. After some self-justification (the argument goes like this: we work in Japan, speak Japanese [kinda] and know Japanese people so we've accrued enough collateral to completely cop out and go to a franchised American coffee chain when we want. This kind of thinking holds a lot of water at 6am) we decided to go to Starbucks which wasn't even open so we had to wander around for a bit. It was quite fun to see all the wackily dresses Tokyo-ites coming back from their night out when we'd just got there. Eventually Starbucks opened and we could get some sweet sweet caffeine.
Our hostel was in Asakusa which has a very nice temple and a big red lantern which I keep forgetting the name off. Pause for Google......it's the Kaminarimon.
Then we went for a quick stop in Shibuya to see the famous Hachiko statue (I'd seen it before - tchah, get yesterday Thom and Kari) and the also famous crosswalk which has about a billion people wander across it a day (well, not a billion, but it is a ludicrously high number).
After that, it was off to Meiji shrine which is in Harajuku - devastatingly, there were NO cosplay people there! Suck! The temple was nice, but then it started to rain and we took the wrong exit out (something we seemed to repeat a lot) so it took us AGES to get back the station. We did manage to make the rain stop though by buying some umbrellas - cue instant nice weather. The store we bought them from also had this charmingly enthusiastic towel on offer.
Our big exciting event was going up to the bar in the Park Hyatt which is featured in Lost in Translation - initially there were some nerves about getting in as Kari had been turned away before for wearing flip flops. Accordingly, she dressed up for the return visit and looked all nice and pretty - by contrast me and Thom just wore out normal togs and looked rrrather casual. We tried to look confident when we got up to the 52nd floor, although our savoir faire was shaken slightly by the very opulent and swanky surroundings. Turns out we needn't have worried though - we got shown straight to a table no probs. The drinks were a little pricey, but it was so cool to be in the Bill Murray bar, we didn't care.
The next day, we decided to go to Tokyo Tower which is like the Eiffel tower, but with all the French elegance sucked out of it. It is bright orange and white - I quite like the colour scheme, but it's not exactly pretty. In fact...isn't that the same colours as Thunderbird 3?
The cool thing about the observatory is that it has sections of glass flooring which you can stand on and freak yourself out. I say cool, I mean a wee bit nerve wracking. The glass flooring does at least have a lattice of steel underneath it so it's easier to convince yourself that it won't suddenly give way and leave you to plummet 150 metres to the earth.
The cheeky thing is, only once you get in do they tell you that you have to queue up and pay again to get to the super high observation deck! It's another 600yen, and the place was rammed with people so we didn't really feel like doing that. The views from the normal deck were nice anyway.
(There's a few more photos to go, but it's late so I'll finish them off tomorrow)
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