Traveling to Tokyo

At 11am on April 18th I boarded a plane to Haneda, Tokyo with Hunter. After being cleared into Delta One, we got settled in for our 12 hour flight.

We ate some delicious salmon and then slept most of the flight. We wanted to sleep a lot because it would help us with the 15 hour time change. 

When we got up, we were an hour away from arriving in Tokyo. They did a few announcements about how everything would work when we arrived, it was quite funny! We had to give two fingerprints, a photo, and have our shoes disinfected. Once we got through customs, we bought Pasmo train cards. We had to get cash to buy them because Japan is a mostly cash country. We got 100 USD which is 10000 YEN. Holding a 10000 bill was crazy! We got on the monorail and headed to the hotel.

We stayed at the hotel called Nest Hotel which is close to the city center. It’s an adorable tiny hotel. Hunter and I loved it and would recommend it, however it is incredibly small so be prepared for that if you ever go. 

We then headed out to find dinner and walk around. We walked towards the Imperial Palace grounds, Hibiya Park, and then found a shopping mall called Hibiya Chanter. In the bottom of the mall they had a ton of different restaurants. Hunter and I picked one and had ramen dishes. It was very interesting ordering with no understanding of Japanese. We sort of just pointed to pictures and used hand gestures.

The view from our hotel

Imperial Palace grounds

More Imperial Palace

The walk along the outside of the Imperial Palace

One of the gates at the Imperial Palace

A bridge at the Imperial Palace grounds

Hibiya Park

Plastic food models, showing what a restaurant has to offer!

Our dinners

After dinner we walked to the Tokyo Tower. It was very pretty all light up.

Hunter and I at this point we’re getting very tired and headed back to our hotel. We stopped at a 7-11 along the way and got a Diet Coke, which is called coke plus here.

The public transit system here is very efficient and fast. We used it s lot and it’s relatively cheap. I wish we had a system like this back home, but Hunter made a good point that there are 37 million people here and not as much back home. 

Tomorrow we have the morning to do some exploring then we take the train to NRT (Narita airport) to fly to Singapore!