Day One.

To preface a little, I’m cheating here by not including our true first day, or Day 0 as i’ve been calling it in my head. But to sum it up nicely, after 48 sleepless hours, cars, planes and trains, experiencing our first time in the Tokyo Metro during rush hour which was an adventure in its own right! We finally made our way to our incredible hotel. I’ll share more details about it when we’ve moved on. After stumbling our way through Sensō-ji temple, introducing ourselves to the famous 7/11 konbini (convenience store, again, worth a whole blog post of its own!), we called it a night at the late hour of 2pm.

Now for the real “Day One”. Waking up more than refreshed at 6am, taking a chance to call my family to show off the hotel a bit, and helping ourselves to some onigiri rice balls for breakfast, we set out towards Tokyo Skytree. This famous landmark, the tallest tower in Japan and the third tallest structure in the world sits proudly at 634 meters high above the Tokyo skyline. Tickets can get you up as high as 450 meters, which we discovered was plenty high enough for me! As terrifying as it was, the experience was magical. There’s no other word for it! Being able to look out over the entirety of Tokyo, the largest city in the world, watching the world go by like ants underneath you. Check out the gallery section on the website or our instagram if you want the proof! We even found a way to make it better, sitting in the cafe at roughly 350m, we ate fried chicken and drank beer while looking out over the miniature city. One highlight of the experience wasn’t the tree itself, but in the queue, chatting to two retired ladies from California who were on a crazy trip of their own! We talked about where we were going and what we’d seen. It was one of those very human moments, where despite being from vastly different homes, a connection was made by a joint adoration for something. As I said before, a wholly magical experience, for any visiting Tokyo who can get over their fear of heights, this was absolutely worth a visit!

As if the Skytree wasn’t enough of an attraction, underneath it sits 6 floors of shops, ranging from clothing stores like Uniqlo, to character based stores like the Snoopy store, we shopped far too much, spending hours more than we expected in the area, if you’re visiting the Skytree plan plenty of time for this unexpected treat!

Post-Skytree, we hopped on the Ginza Line, taking us directly to Nihonbashi, where we had an evening booking at the Pokemon Cafe. Now I will say I was a tad disappointed with the small selection of food on offer, featuring a few very similar curries, three different deserts, and a few types of coffee or cold drinks. When it arrived however, I was surprised by the painstaking effort put into keeping this food on brand! The coffee came with art on top of whichever of the many hundreds of pokemon you fancied, and the curry came served on full Pokemon platters, check out our instagram to see! Topped off with a dancing Pikachu mascott, it was an experience like no other! Well worth a visit for any Pokemon fan! The Pokemon Center attached to the cafe (a department store themed on the hospitals that heal your Pokemon in-game) sold hundreds of plushies, and every type of accessory you could imagine in various themes! It wasn’t somewhere we felt particularly safe with our money!

After this eventful day, we took a train back to Sensō-ji temple and on to our hotel, (I’ll post later about the streets of Tokyo at night, but to summarize, i’ve never felt safer, despite walking in the dark in a huge city, taking dark alleys into unfamilar places. A feeling I’ve never had in any city in England.) ready to get what little sleep we can before our next adventure, and it’s gonna be a big one!

Cheers for reading! Oyasumi! Ed