Tokyo May 4th

Waking up in the Ibis hotel in the high end shopping district of Ginza at 4AM I just couldn’t get back to sleep, even after my marathon journey of 26 hours to get here.

My room is very comfortable but quite compact with all the usual amenities and very good value at about £45 a night. I booked this trip 8 months when Japan was in lockdown and travel from overseas was not possible and I presume hotels were happy to get any reservations. I did look a couple of weeks ago and my room had gone up to £150!

Anyway my first surprise came when I sat on the toilet. It beeped and the bathroom extractor fan started.

“That’s a good idea” went through my head and I gave it no more though.

Sitting there and looking around the pretty normal bathroom I noticed a small remote control.

Making no sense of the lower 4 buttons with Japanese labels my eyes gazed on the other buttons.

Well, let’s try one I thought, wondering if it would dim the light or adjust the air conditioning.

Something whirred into action and I soon found out what it was as the warm spray of water hit me, “ooooh !!”

Totally a Gadget that only an oriental mind with their fastidious notion of cleanliness could of thought of.

Back and front warm water jets, with fully adjustable temperature and pressure. warm air dryer, also fully adjustable. With a heated seat and smell extraction fan.

I must have sat there for half an hour adjusting the various functions and think how comfortable it was.

Perhaps next time I should bring my cup of coffee and a book? LOL

Anyway it was soon time to head off out with Gary and Diane and take a look around. We won’t go far we agreed as we were all still pretty tired.

So we decided to take the train to Shibuya, just 25 minutes away but still very much in central downtown Tokyo.

You may have seen photos taken here of the famous ‘scramble crossing’, which must be one of the biggest pedestrian crossings in the world.

Absolute madness as the pedestrian light goes green, thousands of people make a dash to cross, many stopping to pose for a photo or video. Just start off in the direction you want to go and hope the people around you are also aiming for there.

Then the light goes red and in a matter of seconds the crossing is deserted and traffic is passing again

Safely over the crossing we wandered through the busy streets taking in the sights of the various eateries and shops.

One shop took our attention. Full of brightly coloured slot machines stretching throughout the building. Hundreds of them.

For between 100 and 400 yen, 80p to £3 you could be the owner of a burger ring, cute toy fluffy keyring or a pokemon character doing a vault jump

There’s a big park up the road with a shrine I told the others. “Sounds great, let’s go there” so up the road we went.

“Perhaps just for an hour” we agreed as we’re pretty tired. So after a coffee and cake stop we set off.

Google maps was summoned onto the phone and we headed for Yoyogi Park and the Meiji shrine which were a ten minute walk away.

Watch out for the second part of today’s story later.

TTFN

Bibbley