We arrived! The flight was shorter than we expected, a little shy of 7 hours, which I slept most of.
Prior to our trip, Andrei spent endless hours on Duolingo and reviewing his flashcards. He knew almost the entire Hiragana and Katakana characters (Japanese alphabet). He was very excited to show off his new skills.
At customs, the first question Andrei asked was, “Uhh Uhh, wait how do you say hello in Japanese again?” Needless to say, pride comes before the fall!
Andrei had me convinced we were staying at a small Holiday Inn in Tokyo. After an hour, we arrived at our destination in Shinjuku. Surrounded by skyscrapers right in the middle of all these neon lights stood one of the tallest buildings… our hotel.
Our hotel was very popular. It had a movie theater, night club (pic above), Starbucks inside. We had to take two different elevators just to get to our room. He had warned me rooms in Tokyo were very compact, so I was very surprised when we got to our room. As you can see, it feels like we have our own private observation deck. We arrived just in time to watch the sunset!
In Tokyo, people are everywhere! It truly feels like Times Square at every corner. First, we ate some delicious curry from CoCo Curry. It tasted amazing. Afterwards, we went to the arcade. They have these located everywhere, multiple levels full of crane games, rhythm games, token games, and photo booths. I lost to Andrei in Street Fighter, but then played a drum rythmn game which I did great at. Some of these people spend hours here getting extremely good at these games.
On our way back to the hotel we saw the massive 3D billboard that featured a cat. It felt like it was part of the building. We had barely been in Tokyo for 5 hours and we had already seen so much.
