Today started out a bit rainy so instead of heading right out I sat down and worked on planning out the next leg of my trip. I’m planning on staying with Tokyo for the rest of the week although I’ll be activating my rail pass on Thursday and taking day trips out of tokyo for the next couple of days, then leaving on Saturday for parts unknown. I originally was going to just call up places but being a bit lazy I browsed around and found that Travelocity actually had pretty good Japan coverage for online hotel reservations. As of right now I’ve got reservations to go to Osaka for Sat/Sun and then the next 4 days in Kyoto. Since I’ve been doing things really cheap so far (thanks to Teman!), I decided to splurge and go to some pretty decent hotels so we’ll see how it turns out. Afterwards I think I’m going to go all the way out to Nagasaki and then work my way back to Hiroshima/Miyujima but I think I’m going to hold off an research a bit more first.
Once that was out of the way I headed to the now very familiar Gaienmae station and hopped on the Ginza line to, well, Ginza. Ginza is another upscale shopping district full of towering skyscrapers that caters to more mature tastes than say, Harajuku. From Ginza I walked down to Hibiya Park, an urban oasis in the middle of high-rises. After walking around and seeing some of the biggest koi I’ve seen in my life I headed north to the Imperial Palace. You can’t go inside except for twice a year and there are guards at all the gates but the double bridge and the big moat walls are an impressive sight, although some of the rebuilt buildings around the perimeter could do with a bit of remodeling.
From the imperial palace I headed over to the incredibly busy Tokyo Station with the goal of taking the Yamonote line up to Akihabara. The way you take the trains is very simple - there are huge maps in the train station that show the different lines and how much it costs to get to the various stops from here. Once you have figured out how much its going to cost you, you walk up to a machine, push the “english” button, and proceed to purchase a ticket with that amount encoded on it. On your way to the train you pass your ticket through a turnstile that encodes your starting location and spits the ticket back to you. On the way out you just feed the same ticket to a similar turnstile and, assuming you got the price right, you go on your way.
There are a number of different lines that pass through Tokyo Station including the Shinkansen lines so it can be a confusing place but luckily the lines are color coded to help you find your way - you just need to make sure you know some of the stations in the direction you plan on going to make sure you get on the right train. The trains themselves, at least for the Yamonote which circles the heart of Tokyo, have nice graphical readouts that alternate between english and japanese that show where the train is currently located at as well as dual language announcements for which stop is coming up.
Akihabara (also known as Electric Town) is a crazy place filled with multi-level electronics stores, watch stores, games stores, manga/anime/porn stores, pachinko parlors, arcades, and the occasional maid cafe. Every thing from computers and cell phones to resistors, cabling, and ham radio equipment is for sale either at one of the small shops that line the street or one of the megastores that spiral up 5-10 levels. There were a number of duty free places as well that visitors could escape paying taxes with the right documentation. Prices, from what I saw, were not really better than what you can get off the internet but the selection was incredible. Seeing shop after shop with all these cool cell phones we don’t get in the states was making me a bit bitter. I spent some time exploring Yodobashi Camera which was probably the biggest store in the neighborhood by far. Think Fry’s but bigger, much bigger.
By now it was getting to be about 6 so I decided to head on back. I took the Yamonote to Shimbashi and transfered to the Ginza line. The Yamonote wasn’t that bad but on the Ginza I got to experience the quintessential “packed in like a sardine” Tokyo subway experience. You get pushed around in the crowd almost like it was river as people try to make room for people to get on. If you are lucky, you end up next to something you can hang on to otherwise you get caught up in the crowd as it leans to and fro as one as the subway starts, stops, or takes tight curves.
For dinner, Teman and I headed over to a favorite haunt of his - a tiny little belgium bar that does some small, artsy dishes. Its literally just a single bar with space for maybe 8 people tucked away below sidewalk level. The barkeep/cook/owner is a friendly guy with decent english skills which made ordering much easier since the menu was just a hand-written chalk board all in japanese. We split a number of small dishes - chinese pork that you wrap in lettuce leaves with a bean paste (sorta like what I’ve had at Shilla back home), a middle-eastern hummus dish, and a beef & avocado salad.