Park Hyatt Tokyo Shinjuku

Our ride from Shanghai on ANA was quite lovely. The crew was charming and attentive, although the attentive part could have been attributable to the fact that there were 9 people in the business cabin out of 35 seats. We had beef steak in miso sauce for lunch, accompanied by a selection of sushi and other small bites, and finished with an apple tart. We watched the Time Travelers Wife, or most of it, which was excellent, but they shut off the IFE system 20 minutes prior to landing, and theref...

Clearing customs and immigration was pretty painless, and both our suitcases arrived with us. We quickly found the airport limousine bus, which takes you directly from the airport to a number of hotels in Tokyo, including ours, the Park Hyatt. The bus ride into the city took about two hours, and we hit some traffic. By this time, I had some serious jet lag and just wanted to get to the hotel. Finally, we pulled up to the Park Hyatt Tokyo. As the driver was unloading our bags, a woman from the...

While I was at work today Chris and Nic went over to the Imperial Palace to drop off their passport information and other personal info in anticipation of their tour there tomorrow morning while I am at work. Apparently there is serious security around the emperor. Then they went to Ku'aina Burger for lunch and milled around the Marunouchi downtown area. Right from work we had class from 4-9:30 so Nic used our library card to rent some English DVDs to watch on his laptop at home. We found out...

In Tokyo we took a very efficient airport shuttle to the Park Hyatt Tokyo, an awesome hotel where you check in on the 41st floor. This also happens to be the location seen in Lost in Translation. A woman from the hotel greeted us, already knew our names, and escorted us to the check-in "lounge" while our bags were delivered to our room. We then spent the evening entertained by the automatic button that opened the curtains, the crazy toilet, and sitting at the window looking at the panoramic v...

We woke up early with plans to go to the fish market...and when I say early, I mean eeeeaaaarly, like 4:30 a.m. Why in world would we want to do that? Well, this fish market, called Tsukiji, is the largest fish market in the world. And it gets started early, about 6 a.m., but the giant tuna auction starts around 5 a.m. Nearly all of the restaurants and distributors acquire their fish from this daily market. So we headed out before dawn, took a brisk walk in the cold morning air to the appropr...

So, the adventures continue. Today we went to see the 'Golden ****', which is what the locals call the Philippe Starck designed statue for the Asahi Brewing Company. A monumental structure, dedicated to the gift of brewing (and to a lesser extent, the art of defecating). We carried on towards Senso-ji, a temple of some standing amongst the Buddhists in the locale. It is an interesting example of what happens when you let school children out of school during the daytime. The place was swarming...

Rising early from our pods (with far too little sleep had by either of us), we headed towards the largest fish market in the world. Using our travelcards we ended up walking a far distance over fly overs and past car counters (really just men sitting with about 20 clickers each, counting different things on the roads) due to the fact that not all the underground/city trains are Japan Rail - useful. Anyway the walk was interesting in its own way and we literally followed our senses to the mark...

This short post is about our pre-dawn trip to the Tsukiji Market, which is more popularly known as the Tokyo Fish Market.  It is definitely one of the best places that we have seen on our trip to date.On our second morning in Japan, we all slept a little later.  Still, everyone was awake by 5am, so we decided to go to the Tokyo Fish Market, which is one of the great tourist attractions in a city which frankly doesn't have many.  It is the largest fish and seafood market in the world, and has ...

Moshi moshi from Japan! (Tallulah says moshi moshi as well) Yesterday afternoon we arrived in Japan after a 14-hour flight from New York. The plane was a 777, which is super fast. Finally we got to sit in business class, which was awesome. The seats tilted all the way back into a bed, and we got to watch our own movies. I watched Hancock, Batman, Get Smart, and a long cartoon show. The food was bad, so I only ate the bread, which was good. We flew west, across the international date line, so ...

This morning we were still a little jetlagged and we all woke up at 5:00AM.  Although it was still dark out, no one was tired so we decided to go to the Tokyo Fish Market.  We took a taxi there and got out next to a market area.  We walked around for a while and saw lots of cool things.  We saw lots of small booths selling fish, seaweed, fruits, knives, and other things.  I bought a giant apple - it was almost as big as Lu's head!  One shop was selling real stuffed animals - even a stuffed po...