Day 5 - Travelling to Tokyo

By Chris

We checked out of the beatutiful Sheraton and headed to the mall next door for our usual breakfast of bakery treats. As per usual I sampled some pastries that contained pork sausage (I think) and Danae had things filled with chocolate or cream. Since we had bags, we figured it would be easier to catch the non-JR train (we would have to buy a ticket being non-JR operated) one station and then get on the JR loop line like normal to Osaka station. Easy enough, but upon arriving at Tsuruhashi station I got a bit disoriented, and when swapping to the JR train, we accidentally got on a train heading in the wrong direction. Not a huge problem as trains come every 5 mins or less in both directions. So we got off and swapped to the other side of the platform. After heading about 5 stops in the correct direction, our train stopped and everyone had to get off becuase the train was terminating. Grrr. Finally we arrived at Osaka station and from there we caught a train to Shin-Osaka, and finally (almost) we boarded the Hikari Rail Star to Tokyo. The total number of trains we ended up boarding to get to Tokyo was 7! The 3 hour journey to Tokyo was very pleasant as we watched a movie "She is out of my league" - a movie that has a lot of parallels to Danae and my relationship. The heart-shaped headphone splitter thing that we bought in the gold coast airport has already payed for itself. Unfortunatley we couldn't see Mt Fuji out of the window of the train becuase it was too cloudy, but there were heaps of other interesting things to see moving very quickly out the window. Arriving in Tokyo we had to very quickly figure out the new train and subway system. The Tokyo train system is as complicated as the Osaka subway system, and the Tokyo subway system is as complicated as a bowl of multicoloured spaghetti. I am pretty sure it is the most complicated I have ever seen. So with the help of the information lady, we boarded a Chuo line train to Shinjuku. After about half-an-hour of wandering around aimlessly, we found our new hotel and checked in at about 3 o'clock. Phew! what a journey.

Dumping our bags we went in search of food for a late lunch. We found a nice looking sushi-train (kaiten sushi-ya) type of place and stuffed ourselves with lots of nice raw fish and rice. Not really sure what to do in Tokyo, we walked 20 mins to some government building that has a free viewing platform at the top for a good view over most of Tokyo. Walking home Danae tried a weird deep-fried, red-bean fish thing that I can't even explain. We also stopped to have a crepe filled with cream, icecream, chocolate and other norty things. We refreshed a bit at home, and got dressed for dinner. I had my heart set on trying some Kobe beef (a form of Wagyu beef that is fed beef and given massages with Sake daily), but after a bit of research I found that it wasn't so easy and would likely require a reservation and a lot of money, like $170+ AUD. Instead there is a steak place a block away that we went to. Sitting at our table, we realised that it was another cook-yourself yakiniku place. It was much better this time becuase they had a hilariously-translated menu with pictures so we could actually tell what was going on. We had very yummy plum Whiskey, peach sake, plum sake and we ate a few different kinds of Japanese Wagyu beef which was melt in your mouth awesome along with other things. A funny moment was when the lady brought out salad dressing at the same time as our drinks. We thought the salad dressing in the interestingly-shaped vessel was a part of the plum Sake and we were about to pour it into Danae's glass before the waitress luckily stopped us. After dinner we wandered the extremely bright streets of Shinjuku which I think is the red-light district of Tokyo.