A college friend and I visited Tokyo May 11-18. She'd been touring Asia for over a month, I live in Seoul, and both of us wanted to see Japan, so it made sense to meet there for a short vacation. While I liked Tokyo a lot, I think it would have been more enjoyable if I was "into" that culture as much as I am "into" Korean culture. Pretty much all the anime-themed things we saw were wasted on me. We also went there without really knowing much about the city (what there was to do), and neither of us knew Japanese at all, besides a few basic phrases. I meant to learn the alphabets before I left, but there just wasn't time. And no one there really spoke English to us at all, so it was a lot of gesturing. This may have been less frustrating if I hadn't just gone through the same thing several months ago when I came to Seoul (though, even then, I knew enough Korean that I rarely had to *just* point at things). Comparatively, I think Seoul is much more foreigner-friendly. All public transportation is in Korean and English (and some places, Japanese and Chinese, too), and it seemed much more straight forward (I'm still not sure what the difference between all the lines are in Tokyo). The subways are also more modern. Some of the ones in Japan didn't even have sign boards, so you had to listen for the stop name in Japanese (or read the sign posted on the wall outside when you arrived at a stop). We didn't even bother trying the buses, and given the cost of the subway, we were afraid to take a taxi (though they were really hard to find anyway... in Seoul, they're near every bus stop and subway station). Anyway, we visited a lot of Tokyo's districts, and did a lot of walking. I want to write more, but I'll probably end up just posting pictures and captions for most things....
Day 0
My friend and I arrived in separate terminals at Narita. Thankfully, she was waiting for me outside the baggage claim and customs area. Our first stop was SoftBank, a cellphone carrier, to rent a wifi hotspot ("egg") for the week. It was $12 (or so) for the base rate, then $15/day for unlimited usage. Unfortunately, battery life on the egg was pretty terrible, so after it died mid-day the first day, we ended up turning it on only when needed. Anyway, the trip from Narita to our hotel in Hanzomon via the Narita SkyAccess subway (with a transfer to the Hanzomon metro line) took about 90 minutes and cost $15.
A kid with some crayons designed the subway system.
And rather than LCD displays, they have paper ads that flap in the wind...
We stayed at Hotel Monterey Hanzomon. It's located right by a subway station.
The room was small, but actually bigger than I was expecting.
Japanese money. It's about 100 yen to a dollar. As Korean won is about 1000 won to a dollar,
I was constantly confused. (The Japanese bill in the right picture is worth 10x more than the Korean bill.)
We decided to just eat dinner near the hotel. As everything was entirely Japanese,
I'm not 100% sure what I ordered, but it tasted okay.
Then we bought some Japanese snacks
(though, the top snack is a Korean brand) at the nearby FamilyMart.
Day 1
For our first full day in Tokyo, we wandered around Akihabara. We only planned to see the bi-annual Kanda Festival near the Kando-Myojin Shrine, but ended up finding Electric City, too. (Where they sell a bunch of electronics, and have tons of arcades.) Then we went to the Tokyo Dome (City). The popular 86-member (according to wiki, not sure if they're all active all the time) Japanese girl group AKB48 was having a concert there and we could hear them warming up. We thought about going to the mini amusement park, but decided to leave after just shopping around for a bit.
Kando Festival. There were half a dozen+ different groups of people wearing the same outfit,
parading around carrying palanquins and chanting. It drew quite the crowd.
The Kando-Myojin shrine. (And you may have noticed I like taking pictures of "old vs. new.")
Electric City. Lots of electronics for sale, and games to play.
I'd never eaten raw eggs until this trip. It wasn't very pleasant. Even after mixing it in,
it was still gooey... And my new favorite thing: erasable pens (on the left)!
Tokyo Dome (home to the Tokyo Giants baseball team) and its adjacent amusement park.
Days 2-7 to follow soon!
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