Tokyo Day One - Akhibara and Shibuya

I ended up getting up at 7.30 and my room was a lot colder than normal. I looked out the window and it was pretty much dumping about 10 tonnes of snow. What would normally be a 20 minute walk to the station turned into a 45 minute slog through the snow. But it did'nt matter coz I was going to Tokyo! The Shink (Bullet Train) gets you to Tokyo in 1.30. You kinda scoop around the mountains, then get into the massive plain which is where Tokyo sits. City stretches across the horizon. 32 Million people live in Tokyo and the vast plain that surrounds the city. Its really like the Japanese really didnt care about building an immense city. There are no green fields, football pitches, parks or woodlands. Its pretty amazing.

We ended up at this really good hostel on the 18th floor of a building in Illdabashi, central Tokyo. The view was pretty spectacular when we got there, and at sunset.
















This is looking west towards Shinjuku, one of the main entertainment centers of tokyo. We headed straight for Akhibara - electric town - to check out what was going cheap. I expected flying cars, holograms etc, but all thats there is about a ton of Ipods and little else. Its about 10,000 shops selling the same things, at the same prices. But they are pretty cheap compared to elsewhere.






























Oh yeah, small problem with the hostel. On the website it said there was a 11pm curfew. Which of course would be a major problem. So I called the hostel to be told it was fine and that we'd be allowed to enter through the fire escape. But when we actually got there, the w******* on the front desk told us that this conversation did not occur and that I'd made it up, 11pm was the curfew. So we thought about it when went out to Shibuya during the evening.

Its at this point that I want to let you know a little about the amazingly simplistic Tokyo subway system. Check it out

























So yeah it took a while to figure out. But Shibuya was probably one of the coolest places I've been. All the guide books and Japanese say it is a "young" area. But hey it was cool. There crossroads are supposed to be famous, it was in Lost in Translation, but Ive never seen it.















In Shibuya there was a building where you could watch a Japanese gameshow, but once you've seen one you've seen them all we decided to skip it and head to a pub. Ending up back at the Hostel for that all important 11pm curfew we ended up having a few beers. Funnily enough this amazing hostel actually had a lights out policy. We managed to get a full morning in the morning and onwards to the next hostel.