Tokyo day 2 & 3

After spending a few days in Tokyo, we can say with certainty that it is a huge city and that there are LOTS OF PEOPLE!!! It doesn’t seem to matter where in the city you go, you can guarantee that there will be thousands of people there with you. You can walk down streets and streets of shops at any time of the day or night, and every street and every shop will be crammed full!
These are a few places/suburbs we have visited in the last couple of days:


Akihabara

Akihabara is known as the Electric City. There are streets and streets of huge shops specialising in every type of electronics products you could possibly imagine, ranging from computers, cameras, phones, ipods etc, to shops selling only wiring, screws, plugs, and even one selling a range of metal working lathes. Apparently the prices here used to be really cheap, but now they are about the same as the rest of Japan, and much, much more expensive than New Zealand and Australia (almost double for many things). The Akihabara shops are famous for having all the newest products that haven’t reached the shops anywhere else in the world though, so it was pretty interesting window shopping – if you could see around the thousands of other people!

Crowds in Akihabara

Inside ‘Club Sega’

Down all the streets there are girls dressed up in costume (mostly as maids with bunny ears?) handing out advertising

This shop ‘Taito Station’ had dozens and dozens of those little arcade games where you try to grab the toys inside. It was absolutely packed!

Inside ‘Sofbank’ – an 8 storey electronics department store. It was jam packed with unbelievable amounts of stuff – a whole floor of cameras, another one of video cameras, a floor of Apple products etc.

The range of camera lenses at Sofbank

If you feel like you need to have the biggest lens possible, I suggest you try this one. To give some perspective, the camera body on the bottom shelf is a fairly large SLR. Bags not carrying this lens around!!

New camera bag anyone?

Akihabara by night

Ginza

Ginza is a VERY flash district with all the major brand name shops – Prada, Louis Vuitton etc. LOTS of money in this area! Justin particularly wanted to go there because of a Nissan museum he had heard about which turned out to be a tiny little room with two cars, but he wasn’t disappointed with all the flash cars driving around the streets.

Shibuya

The intersection below is apparently the world’s busiest intersection. After watching a couple of crossings there you can definitely believe it! There are actually some roads somewhere under those people. It was a public holiday here, so I’m not sure if that made the shopping district busier or less busy, but either way there were an awful lot of people!

We had Indian for lunch in Shibuya – possibly the best Indian I have ever had! The naan bread in particular was just sensational, freshly cooked and just melt in your mouth. They had all-you-can-eat naan bread, so Justin and I went through about two pieces this size – each!! Felt a bit sick afterwards, but it was sooo good!

The food here has so far been pretty different to what we expected. We kind of pictured lots of sushi trains and bento lunchboxes, but so far we haven’t had either and have only seen one sushi train. There is a huge range of food, and lots of really yummy rice dishes. We certainly won’t be losing any weight!!

Shinjuku

There is an observatory on the 45th floor of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building in Shinjuku which has amazing views over the whole city. Unfortunately we chose a rainy overcast day to go up there... It was still pretty amazing though, it is just city and more city as far as you can see in every direction.

Outside the Government building

View from the observatory

View at night (we could hardly get any decent photos because of all the rain on the glass!)

Jo, this one is for you. It’s a Totoro!! J Justin just gave me strange looks when I got all excited about finding this in the observatory shop.

Mucking around in the rain outside the Government building

Homeless people living under the bridge just down from the Government building

We spent part of the day shopping in Shinjuku. I went nuts in the ‘hyaku-en’ shop, which is a 100 yen shop or basically a 2 dollar shop. They have a huge range of stuff including a whole supermarket section. Justin was a bit horrified but it didn’t hurt the bank too badly overall!

We went tie shopping for Justin in one of the big shopping centres after that. We found a really nice Armani tie for about $350 but for some reason Justin decided he didn’t need one quite that much! I think maybe we were shopping in the wrong sort of shopping centre...

New golf bag?

Shinjuku streets

Umbrella central

A cute little alleyway we found with some fantastic smelling little restaurants!

More vending machines – icecreams, biscuits and newspapers

A random train

Some of our hyaku-en purchases:

Thong/jandal socks

‘We’ve found a taste we would like you to know. Please try it.’ (These were disgusting by the way!!)

Shinjuku also has the world’s busiest train station. Not only the busiest, but it would also have to be the craziest. It is a bit of a rabbit warren – it is a really old station and has gradually expanded over the years, with new sections tacked on here and there and new subway levels built underneath.

On our first day in Tokyo we were telling somebody that we had changed trains at Shinjuku and they just about fell over, congratulating us on being able to do that. We hadn’t realised at that point what a big station it was, and actually just fluked finding the right line straight away. Now that we have been through the station a few times we realise why they were so blown away!! There are dozens and dozens of different lines that go through there, and you could literally spend hours wandering around lost inside the station! To give you some stats, the station has 7 underground levels, over 200 exits, and handles 3-4 million people per day (basically the whole of New Zealand using it every day!!)

We have pretty much got the train lines sorted out in Tokyo now (or we think we have anyway!). Number one is to get an English train map! We didn’t have that on our first couple of trips, which made it quite interesting...

The Tokyo train network map looks something like this. (I know you can’t see much when it’s this small, but trust me, it doesn’t help much more when it is bigger either!!)

To go anywhere, you need to work out what your destination is, which train line it is on, and which direction you want to go, otherwise you could end up the complete opposite end of the train station! Once you have those things worked out though it is actually pretty easy finding your way around, everything is really well colour coded and signposted in English as well as Japanese.



Suidabashi

We jumped off at Suidabashi station on our way home one night since there was a cool looking ferris wheel and lots of fancy lights, so it looked like a good spot for some photos. We discovered when we got to the base of the ferris wheel that it was part of Tokyo Dome amusement park, and that a baseball game had just finished in the Tokyo Dome. There was an astronomical amount of people pouring out of the centre, and since it was raining it was just a giant sea of umbrellas! There were also literally hundreds of people dressed up in fancy costumes – we weren’t actually sure if they were coming from the baseball game or some other party or something, but there were all sorts of super heroes and Little Bo Peep style costumes, amongst many other things.

This little canal was really pretty with the lights reflected into it, but we didn't have time to take any decent photos since the traffic lights had just changed and we were about to get mobbed by a few thousand people!!