Monday, 22 April 2013

First Day in Tokyo

Our first 24 hours in Tokyo consisted of lots of walking, very little sleeping and lots of fish!!!

We arrived in Tokyo on Sunday night after a 10 1/2 flight and a 1 1/2 hour bus ride. My husband, Don, and I went for a walk to get some dinner. Luckily, the restaurant that we went to had pictures of the food so we could point to what we wanted to order. After that we walked back to our hotel, Hotel Chinzanso Tokyo. We had not slept much on the plane so we tried to go to bed but we found out that it was hard to sleep for some silly reason. We finally fell asleep but, unfortunately, we did not sleep for long...our bodies and minds were confused about the time. In Japan, we are 16 hours ahead of Surrey's time. So when it was midnight here, in Surrey it is 8am. So, just when we were trying to sleep, our minds were thinking, "It is time to get up!" Confusing, isn't it?

So, we got up at about 4am (Japan time) and decided we had better go do something. We caught a taxi to a very large fish market called Tsukiji Fish Market. It is the largest fish market in the world! Apparently, it has over 400 different kinds of seafood. The people in Japan eat a lot of seafood!!! We were hoping to go see the tuna auction, where they auction off huge tuna to fish buyers, but we got there too late. A man told us that we had to be there by 4am to be in time to get a ticket to watch the auction (they only let 140 visitors in each day). Instead we wandered around the shops and saw many kinds of seafood that was fresh, frozen, dried, and prepared many other ways. I have never seen so much seafood!!! We even had some sushi for breakfast!
 Men peeling prawns
 Asking directions
 giant scallops
 lobster
 a man who looks like Elvis

 Breakfast

It was so busy and crazy in the fish market. There were men driving little transport cars, people on bikes, trucks, pedestrians going in every direction. I can not believe that they did not smack into each other all the time. 
 There were hundreds of bikes
 Transport vehicles
rush hour at the fish market

more rush hour

After the fish market, we walked toward downtown Tokyo. I thought that the streets would be so busy but most people were working. We walked and walked and saw some pretty cool buildings. We had a delicious lunch/dinner of ramen, which is a type of soup with noodles, vegetable and some very yummy flavourings.
 Kabuki-za Theatre



 Inside the convention centre


One very strange thing that happened (well 2 actually) is that when we were walking earlier in the day, my husband stopped to talk to a man about an Olympic pin that he was wearing (Tokyo wants to host the Olympics in the year 2020). A bit later, we were sitting outside at a Starbucks and the same man came over and gave the pin to Don. We could not believe that we saw him again because there are so many people in Toyko and the Starbucks was not even near the spot where we talked to him the first time. Just after that, another man who was having a coffee, came over to ask us where we were from. We told him and he said that he goes to Whistler a couple of times a year for business. His English was very good and he gave us lots of information about Tokyo and suggested some things that we should see. Well, wouldn't you know it but we saw him again, too! It was about 2 hours later and we walked right past each other, stopped briefly to say hello and were, again, amazed that we saw the same man twice in one day in this very big and busy city.

Finally, we were too tired to walk any more so we decided to go back to our hotel. This was going to be our first experience with the subway (a train that runs underground). It is very hard to figure out where you need to go when everything is written in Japanese. Luckily, there were many nice people who spoke enough English that they were able to help us. After lots more walking to the train, and then from one train to another, and then up a big hill to our hotel, we made it back and relaxed for the evening.
 2 little girls going home from school
 The view from our hotel room

More fun tomorrow!!

No comments:

Post a Comment