No Smorking

Our flight into Tokyo was not as good as our previous flight, the difference between JAL and Finnair is huge. After we claimed our bags, we took the train from Narita to Shinjuku from where it was supposed to be a 5 minute walk to the hotel. For those of you who’ve never been to Tokyo, I’ll share some information on how the city map works: It doesn’t. Except for a few major streets, none of the streets have names. Tokyo is divided into districts, which are divided into so called chomes. Now each chome has a number, so your hotel might be located at ‘Shinjuku 3′. The next trick is to locate the correct building. Each building is of course numbered, but unfortunately not in sequence, but by construction date (building number 3 could be located directly between 88 and 198). Please keep in mind that each chome is the size of a standard city block, so if you don’t know exactly where you’re going, your bound to get lost.

We came prepared and thanks to a handy explanation we grabbed of TripAdvisor, we knew exactly where to go. So we thought… After a good 45 minute hike with our bags through the streets of Tokyo, a local was nice enough to point us in the right direction. The hotel itself (Sunroute Plaza) was pretty nice and we had a good night sleep.

The next morning we ventured into Tokyo, in search of the Government District and the city hall. Tokyo has the highest city hall in the world and on the 45th floor there is a nice lookout over the city. Once on top we took some pictures and relaxed for a bit. Still pretty tired from the day before, we decided to take it easy that day and didn’t do anything else.

On Wednesday we started off early and took the subway to the station closest to the Imperial Palace. The Imperial Palace is a large palace and supposed to be one of the biggest on earth. In our eyes it was actually rather small, but apparently a large section isn’t visible to the public eye. The palace is open to the public on only two days per year, but since we weren’t there on any of those days we just had to settle for the outside view. We walked around half of the complex, after which we grabbed the subway to the Tokyo Tower. While walking towards the tower, we passed a bus station where we made sure we weren’t smorking as that activity was not allowed over there.

The Tokyo Tower looks like the Eiffel Tower. In fact, the Tokyo Tower is an exact replica of the Eiffel Tower, only painted in silly colors and 8 or so meters higher. The partially glass elevator was not very fast, so we had plenty of time to ‘enjoy’ the views as we ascended to the lower observation deck at 150m. Adventurous as always, Yvo insisted that we would go up to the second observation deck at 250m. The ride up (again in a similar horrific elevator) was somewhat, eh…, disturbing. About halfway up, a smooth voice told us that we were going to hear a sound, which we were to ignore as it was part of the safety mechanism. We heard a sound alright, a nasty ‘clunck’ accompanied by a slight tremble, exactly the kind of thing you want to experience while ascending in a glass elevator in an open structure at an altitude of 200m. The view over the city was stunning, so it was well worth it, but we were both very happy to be on Terra Firma again 20 minutes later.

There was one final stop on our schedule that day: The Meiji Temple. We were somewhat aware of where it was supposed to be, but somehow we managed to end up in front of the Dutch Embassy. The Embassy in combination with the Tokyo Tower gave us a clear indication of where we were and what direction we should travel in. The Meiji Jungu (temple) was partially under reconstruction, but the inside gave us a feeling of serenity. Back at the hotel we decided to call it a day and went to bed early.