Around the World: Tokyo, Japan

Hello Everyone!

It’s taken us a bit of time but we finally have our blog up and running!

We left for our World Adventure on Friday March 4^th, 2011 with our first stop being Tokyo, Japan. We had to stop over in Vancouver first for a few hours and then had a 9.5 hour flight to Tokyo. We were very happy to get off the plane...it was a long flight! I think we were both expecting to have a bit of a culture shock but were very surprised at how easy it was to get around. We got our bags and figured out how to catch the airport bus into Tokyo (the airport is about an hour away from the city center). We got a taxi from the bus terminal that took us to our hotel only to realize that it was the wrong hotel. Our hotel was one from the same chain a few minutes away. So the receptionist grabbed our bags and walked us to our hotel. I think we were both shocked that he was actually walking us there and carrying our bags as if it was no big deal. Everyone was so friendly even though there was not as much English as we thought there would be. People were very eager to help us out if we were looking for something. A lot of the signs or instructions in Tokyo will start in both English and Japanese for example it will say “Read for Instructions” but then all the instructions will be in Japanese so we needed some help sometimes! We stayed in the Ginza district of Tokyo which is right in the city center. The streets are like mazes of spaghetti with streets up really high and ones crossing under it, it’s so busy. The next day we got up early and decided to start our Adventure off with some fun...and what better place to do that then Disneyland Tokyo! We spent the morning at the park and then decided to see the sights around our area after. We went to see the Imperial Palace and its grounds which are right in the middle of downtown Tokyo. The palace is up really high on a hill to protect it from intruders and today you can only get as far as the first bridge into the inside grounds of the palace so most of it is still off limits. The Palace grounds have a lot of trees but otherwise most of the grounds are bare with stones on the ground and there are no flowers or grass. Other then walking around the Ginza district we didn’t get to see much else because of the time change we ended up falling asleep early. One thing we did notice and you may have now with all the news coverage lately is that every second person wears a face mask. Some people have plain ones but you can even get them with designs like Hello Kitty. We left Tokyo on Monday March 7^th only to find out later in the week that the before shocks of the earthquakes had begun the day after we left. We had thought of spending more time in Tokyo and were both happy that we didn’t. Seeing how many buildings, roads and people in such a small space and thinking about past earthquakes in Tokyo (I kept thinking about Kobe) is very eye opening at how bad it could be during an earthquake. I couldn’t imagine being high up on one of the highways that winds through the city center and an earthquake hitting.