Trip To Tokyo!!!!

After months of planning and a great deal of anticipation we were finally going to Tokyo! The original plan was to go with a fairly large group of friends and all stay together in the same place and do the same things but different people wanted to do different things, so in the end it was just the 4 of us, Alanna, Yukiko, Naomichi and myself heading to Tokyo on that day. It turns out we were quite lucky to have decided to go a day later as a pretty bad typhoon hit Tokyo the day before. My roommate had actually gone down that day and ended up coming back the same night because all the trains were shut down and he couldn't get to where he was planning to stay.

I knew going to Japan I needed to ride the bullet train at least once, and thought this would be a perfect opportunity to do so. It was fairly pricey but the experience was definitely worth it! When we first boarded the train it felt as though we were in the cabin of an airplane. As the train began to pull away from the station, the similarities to flying continued as we approached 300km/h. A really nice feature that our train had was that we could spin our seats around and face each other for the duration of the trip. We played some cards are chatted to pass the time. (Though there wasn't much time to kill. We got to Tokyo in a little under a hour and a half!)

When we arrived at Tokyo Station we had the great fun of navigating Tokyo's maze of Subway lines to meet up with our friends in Harajyuku. We managed to get to where we would be staying for the next few nights, Sakura Hostel, with fairly little effort thanks to Naomichi and Yukiko's amazing navigation abilities! For the first night we would be staying in a traditional Japanese style room which consisted of four Japanese futons laid out on the floor. We set our stuff down and set out to enjoy some Halloween festivities around Tokyo.

We came across a really neat festival of sorts which had a couple really spectacular floats. After taking a bunch of pictures we decided to head back to our hostel and call it a night.

The following day we decided to visit some famous places in Tokyo. We started out by going to Asakusa Temple, the largest Buddhist temple in Tokyo. Needless to say it was amazing! Afterwards, a couple of friends wanted to do some shopping in some famous shopping district in Tokyo so I tagged along.

We saw many interesting things, but possibly to strangest was a women who was walking a monkey like a dog. I laughed to myself about how much of a pain it must have been for her to be allowed to have one, considering how hard it was for me to simply open a bank account...

To finish off the day we headed to possibly the most famous place in Tokyo, Shibuya. You may know this as the busiest intersection in the world. It certainly lived up to its name. The moment the lights changed to allow people to cross, the streets flooded with people from every direction!

That night we changed rooms to one with 2 bunk beds. It was certainly a downgrade from our previous night, but it was almost half the price so it was not much of a sacrifice. It didn't matter much anyways seeing as the following morning we'd be heading to Disneyland, so we were all in good spirits!