Tokyo, day 1

We packed up our stuff and left Hakone. A 50 minute bus ride, half an hour on the Shinkansen, and two subway trains later, we dragged our increasingly heavier and heavier bags to the hostel we are staying at in Asakusa. I'll also mention here that it was a very humid sort of day. Oh, and Calum was in the sort of mood that made all three of us want to strangle him. So by the time we reached our new accommodations we were all pretty wrung out.

Around the corner from the hostel is an outdoor market. We found a small ramen shop where we soon restored our energy with a nice hot bowl of noodles accompanied by many cups of cold water. From here, we set out to find some new books for the kids to read. The Lonely Planet suggested the Kinokuniya bookstore in Shinjuku, so off we went.

This was our first encounter with the confusing system of the Tokyo Metro. Even though the various maps will show you a single system of coloured lines snaking around the city, in fact there are several different companies operating the metro trains and they don't accept each others tickets. For some reason the subway maps - and I have quite a few - keep it secret which lines belong to which company. (OK, this is a bit of an exaggeration but let's just say it is not at all obvious). So when you go to switch trains you may need to prepare yourself to pay yet another fare when you pass through a ticket gate to switch from one line to another. Another hurdle that international travellers have to jump over is the lack of consistency in English signage. Often the huge maps posted above the ticket machines are in Kanji (chinese characters) only, with nothing anywhere around you to indicate the station names in romanized characters. This is a bit of a problem since the maps tell you what fare to pay based on where you are going. The ticket machines themselves will have an english button option but don't tell you anything about destinations - their function is just to sell tickets worth different amounts.

My solution to this problem has been to either get out the bilingual Tokyo city atlas which I found in a bookstore in Vancouver, so that I can try to figure out which kanji goes with which station name, or if I forget to bring the book I just buy the lowest possible value ticket and then at our destination we can take advantage of the handy "fare adjustment machine" next to the exit gate, which reads your ticket and then tells you how much more you need to pay to make up the cost of your journey. This is a great system, actually, since it allows you to change your mind mid-journey about where you want to exit the train. I guess your average commuter doesn't need to do that too often but when you are exploring the city it is nice to have some flexibility.

Once we got out of the station at Shinjuku we encountered the vastness of Tokyo for the first time. Our Lonely Planet book's guidance failed us for once, simply advising that the bookstore could be reached via the east exit of the station. Well, there is an awful lot going on outside of the station, and when you leave the east exit you are confronted by your stereotypical bustling Tokyo street. Taxis, buses, bicycles parked everywhere, hundreds of pedestrians hurrying in every direction, huge buildings with three-storey-high flashing billboards, lots and lots of stores -- we saw all these things but no
bookstore. Fortunately, as I was consulting my map, a passing cyclist stopped to ask if we needed any help, then insisted on walking with us to the bookstore so that we would not get lost. There are so many friendly people in Japan, eager to help you out.

The kids got their books, and Megan and I also got our first good look at a local gothic lolita clothing store, in a large Shinjuku department store called OIOI. There were several floors of incredibly frilly goth-loli dresses and accessories, most of them far too small for Megan (who is rather bigger than the average Japanese girl) and all of them way, way outside of our price range. Still, it was very fun to look at the clothes and sneak peeks at the girls who were shopping alongside us in full gothic lolita outfits. If you have no idea what I am talking about, here's a link to some images of the gothic lolita style: link

By this point, we were pretty much worn out so we travelled back to our hostel and ordered some Japanese pizza, conveniently available for delivery from Domino's. It is truly amazing how the Japanese can take something as ordinary as pizza and come up with a gazillion unique flavour combinations. Some of them work surprisingly well - shrimp, squid and wasabi pizza is truly delicious, smothered in mozzarella cheese. Potato and mayonnaise pizza also seems to be a staple item on the menu of most places here that serve pizza, and it is quite good. However, for our first night here I stuck with something relatively safe, margherita (plain old cheese, tomato and basil) for Megan, a box of chicken nuggets for Calum, who doesn't like white cheese and thus won't eat pizza, and Jeff and I went for the delicious and slightly less ordinary bacon and camembert.