Japan Day 17: Tokyo Day 2
Since we didn’t get home till sometime between 5:30 and 6:00 this morning after our crazy day yesterday we slept quite late this morning. We got up around 12:30 and realized that we had missed checkout time at 12:00. Scott made a quick phone call down to the front desk, today was the last day that we knew we had a room for the night at the military hotel, we thought we would most likely need to find other lodgings for the night. Anyway, Scott called down told them that we had overslept and that we would be down shortly. He then asked if there was any chance they had a room for us for tonight. As luck would have it, they did. This hotel is literally usually booked a year in advance and we just got three nights in a row, we seriously lucked out. We did stay in a different room each night but no biggie there. We were very happy that we didn’t have to find a new hotel and to celebrate we went back to sleep.
We didn’t sleep long though, my tummy wasn’t very happy with me and we were both pretty hungry. I wanted comfort food, like waffles or pancakes, Scott wanted Indian food. Scott won. I am not at all a fan of Indian food really but sometimes with Scott you just need to follow in his wake so we were off to Indian food. Scott ordered us some stuff, I got butter chicken and curry chicken, the food was ok, I liked the curry chicken better and the bread was nice. My tummy on the other hand really didn’t like the Indian food, in fact I think it made matters worse. After eating we walked back to the hotel, we made it back just in time too, as I said, unhappy stomach.
We spent the majority of the afternoon watching TV as I made frequent trips to the restroom. Around 4:00 my stomach was doing better (better, not perfect) and we were re-energized so we decided to go back out. I wanted to see the Imperial Palace and Scott wanted to show me the high end shopping district called Ginza. We got our butts in gear and headed for the subway.
Our first stop was the imperial palace. Unfortunately since we got a late start by the time we got to the imperial palace the sun was already going down and I didn’t bring my good camera so my pictures kind of suck, crappy thing is I should have brought the good camera, oh well. The palace grounds are pretty cool, it’s weird how there is this big piece of land right in the middle of a concrete jungle. The emperor actually lives on the grounds. You can’t see much of the palace, they only really open it up two days a year, on the emperors birthday and on January 2nd for New Years. I did get to see the moat, the famous bridge that is on the grounds as well as some cool building that sits behind the bridge. My pictures are pretty crappy but here they are anyway.
Told you they were crappy pics.
From there we headed off towards Ginza which is a quick walk from the palace grounds. On the way we saw the Tokyo Tower off in the distance. It looked cool but was kind of far away so we didn’t go over to it. I did take a really crappy picture of it. The picture is so bad though that I will spare you it, but here is a picture of it that I stole off the net.
Soon after that we were in Ginza. Ginza is pretty crazy, there are just tons and tons of stores, you name it, you can probably find it in Ginza. You can look down the street and it is just lined with huge stores. Then if you walk down a block and look it’s the same thing, and it’s like this for blocks on end. We went to a few different places. We went into the Sony store which is like 8 stories tall and carries just about every item Sony sells. Since Scott is a huge Mac fan, we went to the Mac store. We went to a Nissan store where they had the new Skyline on display and I got to sit in one, that was awesome. I should also mention that the streets and all the stores that we went into were absolutely packed with people. On Sundays it gets so crowded that they close the street off to cars. I am glad we weren’t there on Sunday because we saw some mind bendingly awesome cars while we were there, more on that in a minute.
I actually didn’t take many pictures while we were in Ginza for some reason. But here are the few that I did.
This is just as we are entering the major shopping area of Ginza.
Here is the Skyline, for some reason the pictures of the outside of the car that I took ended up all blurry even though the car wasn’t moving, was well lit, and I was standing still. I was sober too. So, I only got a couple pictures of the interior.
Here is the Wako department store which is one of the most exclusive department stores in Japan. I actually didn’t know what it was when I took the picture, it was just a cool looking building so I took a picture.
Here is just a random building in ginza, exciting no?
By far my favorite part of Ginza was the cars. Ginza is the high end shopping area of Tokyo and as I mentioned earlier some of the cars we saw there were stunning. At one point we saw a yellow Ferrari parked on the side of the road, as we were standing there another Ferrari passed the parked one and a Bently drove by shortly after the ferrari. We saw countless high end Mercedes and BMWs, dozens of Porches, a couple of Aston Martins, a few more Bentley’s and Ferrari’s. But then I saw something I didn’t think I would ever see on the road. I quite literally couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was a Porsche Carrera GT, for you non-gear heads out there, this is a roughly $500,000 dollar car and it just drove by me. It sounded and looked amazing. I tried getting a picture but it didn’t really turn out very well, I will show it to you anyway though. As a car nut this was quite the thrill for me, I almost made a mess in my pants actually.
For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about, here is what the Carrera GT looks.
After Ginza we headed back to the hotel. I went and took another shower and used the facilities once again, my stomach was still on the fritz, Scott headed down to the bar. I joined him shortly, I took it really easy on the drinks that night, I wanted to take some mercy on my stomach. We never really got motivated to go out again so we just got some bar food for dinner. We ended up closing out the bar, as I said, I took it really easy though. We then just went up to the room passed out, tomorrow I say goodbye to Scott and head back to Narita as he heads back up to Misawa.
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