Wednesday 18 March 2009

ShinJuku





We spent a full day yesterday in Shinjuku, which was great. It's meant to be one of the busiest places in Japan with 3m people traveling through the train station every day! I have to say, I didn't think it was that busy when we were there. We walked around for hours and tried to get round all the different types of places. We spent some time walking around Kabukicho, the red light and gaming district, which was funny. The games area is pretty full on, and the noise is amazing when you walk into them. Here's one for the boys: they have a football game where you sit in front of a big screen, but between you and the screen is a pitch, and you lay out your players (imagine the sort of playing cards with players on them that you would collect when you were young) on the pitch in the formation you want them to play! I thought that was pretty cool.

We then went to Shinjuku-Gyoen, which is a 144 acre park, one of Tokyo's biggest. It was lovely, very quiet, loads of nice views, little lakes, and the cherry blossom trees which weren't quite in full bloom yet, but still looked pretty nice.

We had lunch after this in 'Times Square', which is a huge building of shops. This is definitely one for the girls, they had FOUR floors of girls fashion! We had lunch in here before heading to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Offices, which have an observatory on the 45th floor. For those of you sitting in the Norwich Union York offices, thats much higher than the sixth floor!! :-) The views were amazing, right across the city. Unfortunately despite being a nice sunny day, it wasn't clear enough for us to see Mt. Fuji.

We then went to another few places before getting the train home. We're still being affected by jetlag though, and went for a lie down at 4pm when we got home, and that's me just up at 7am the next morning. Today we're going to Harajuku for Kelly, as this is the fashion district. We're also going to Akihabara which is the electrical district so I can see all the latest gadgets! And I've just been informed that tonight (assuming we are awake) we are going to Roppongi, which has all the bars and restaurants.

OK, time to go get ready to go out, and this could be the last blog for a while unless in the electrical district I manage to find a plug converter as this laptop is about to run out of juice!

P.S. I'm struggling to upload all my photos onto facebook, so I will let you know when any go on. In the meantime, the few on the blog will have to do you.

1 comment:

  1. Are cans of coke getting bigger or are you getting smaller?

    ReplyDelete