We’re here! Though a bit the worse for wear. Longhaul west to east is never the best, especially when it’s a 14-hour flight with an 8-hour time difference. You get on the plane first thing one morning and get off first thing the next morning but the night that should be in the middle goes missing, which is why we’re both completely knackered.

Unfortunately, things that seem normal to us Europeans can cause great offence here, such as tipping taxi drivers or leaving your shoes on the floor pointing in the wrong direction. Yawning, during a conversation, therefore, with the extremely polite Japanese, is probably unforgivable so we’ll have to get those sleep patterns sorted out quickly.

Luckily, we managed to get an early check-in as soon as we arrived at the hotel and all we wanted to do was lie down and go to sleep – so what we did, of course, was dump our bags in the room and rush straight out to explore Tokyo!

We have no tour guide until tomorrow, so we jumped straight in at the deep end and decided to go grapple with the Tokyo subway system.

The station is only five minutes from the hotel so we we’re there within the hour! Well, it is a bit of a maze.

Finding the right train was easy and, after only another half hour, we were back exactly where we started. Right train, wrong direction😫.

No matter, within the hour we had arrived at Tokyo main station, collected our train passes for the bullet trains and spent another hour reserving all our train seats for the next two weeks. You would think that, in high-tech Japan, this could all be done on the Internet in five minutes, but it’s a completely manual process so it takes some time.

With all the admin finally complete we set out to explore. Firstly we went to Ginza, the upmarket shopping district but it is just full of very European stores rather than being an interesting showcase for Japan so, as we didn’t need Gucci gloves or Prada pants, we decided to leave and caught another three tube trains (one out of Ginza, another back to Ginza and a final one out of Ginza again, but this time in the correct direction!) to Asasuka to see the Senso-Ji which is an ancient Buddist temple and the oldest temple in Tokyo. It’s one of the most visited religious sights in the world, visited by 30 million people a year. Unfortunately most of them seemed to have turned up today 😫

By now we were both flagging so we had a quick (and very refreshing) bowl of ramen

… then we abandoned our sightseeing for the day and returned to the hotel (only one wrong train this time so we are improving).

Tomorrow is our first full organised day. Today was a bit overwhelming, loads of people, strange train systems and just a big bustling city when we really just needed sleep, so our first impression of Tokyo could be better. However, we know that it’s a huge diverse city and tomorrow we start exploring in ernest with a professional guide so I’m sure we will get to see the real Tokyo.

We will report back tomorrow evening.

Coming tomorrow…Japanese toilet roulette – yes, really!

22:30 6th May 2023 – Park Hotel, Tokyo