Tokyo - day 1 - Shinjuku
After a 13.5 hour flight we took a cab and checked in at our apartment at 13:00.
It turned out to be a clean apartment on the 4th floor (no elevator). Of course, everything is small but functional and we have 2 floors - bathroom and bedroom on floor 1, living room, kitchen, toilet and bedroom (futon bed!) on floor 2. (Actually, it’s “huton” because there is no “f” in Japanese.)
The bathroom is Japanese style - the faucet is outside the bath and 20 cm above the floor, and you are supposed to share the bath water with family so a bath cover is available. Not sure if warm water is naturally sun-heated and limited, but we will find out.
The toilet is equipped with the full Japanese washing system - but I think that deserves its own blog!
We couldn’t resist the temptation to go and lie down for a while - but as we felt guilty and needed to go out and explore, that while was rather short. Soon enough we were showered albeit zombie-like and went outside.
We wanted to go to Shinjuku center, and traced our walking route to the closest subway station - passing a charming 7-11 convenience store and an equally charming café with breakfast potential.
We bought travel passes and boarded a metro to Shinjuku station. This is the most notoriously complicated station in Tokyo but we were ready! We found the Shinjuku center and walked around the thousands of restaurants, karaoke bars with multiple floors and some red-light-district establishments. We tried our luck in a restaurant with good reviews but it turned out it was only for “all you can eat” contests. We also found out that English often doesn’t really help communicating and introduced lots of misunderstandings - we should definitely try to speak our very limited Japanese from now on. We decided to go to a Tonkatsu (pork cutlet) restaurant close by and we exhaled a sigh of relief when we saw a digital tablet ordering system. We sighed too soon: I successfully ordered an “oolong tea high” to find out that it was not in a tall glass but rather spiked with whisky.
