Greetings from Tokio

Best wishes from Tokio. I landed here yesterday morning - quite tired 🥱 and exhausted from the overnight travel. After landing at Tokio airport, immigration, baggage claim 🧳 and clearing customs I arrived at around 11 am in the guesthouse 🏠where I am staying for the first few nights here. Turns out it is in the outskirts of Tokio. But that’s OK. However, I have to figure out Tokio‘s good but complicated public transportation system now. 🚊
It doesn’t help that everything is in Japanese signs which are nothing but hieroglyphs ♎️ to me. This is how it must be for people who can’t read and write😩 Luckily, the most important words like station names are translated to English. Otherwise I would be completely lost 😅 On top of that, there are multiple operators for subway, train, bus and tram but no day or week pass that combines them all. So, I had to go to the ticket vending machines before I could take any train - also for changing train lines 😨 There is the „Suica Card“ though; that eliminates this issue since it can be used as prepaid card for nearly all transportation methods and also for grocery stores 🏪 but it is really hard to get one. Since I didn’t manage to get a Suica card, a lady (working in my guesthouse) lend me her spare card for the time being.
Outside of learning about transportation in Tokyo, I didn’t do much yesterday anymore. 😊 I talked to some people who are also staying at the guesthouse but most of them speak only French 🇫🇷 and are currently learning Japanese 🇯🇵 That is why I am using Google Translate a lot these days. 😂 For lunch the owner of the guesthouse went to a restaurant close by with us. This place had good food 🍱 and was cheep. Ordering through the tablets at the table was difficult though because also here we encountered the hieroglyphs ♎️ But of course the owner managed everything for us. He even paid the bill and invited us at the end - approximately 35,- EUR for all 5 of us. 😊
In the afternoon, I headed to the city and went to Shibuya Station. I had read about the famous Shibuya Crossing that you and I definitely have seen already in the movies 🎥 I ended up in the Hikari Building which offers some great views from its sky terrace in the 11th floor. Besides that, there were some really nice restaurants in the upper levels as well as some deli shops 🏪 in the 2 ground floor levels. It’s seems to be the equivalent to the KaDeWe in Berlin (if you know that). I was still stuffed from lunch that day but I am sure I will come back to this place in the next couple of days to try out some of these deli‘s and maybe even a restaurant. 🍲

Today, I went to „TeamLab Planet“ - a permanent immersive art exhibition here in Tokyo. I had booked a time slot for 11 am and left the guesthouse 30 min earlier than I would need for getting there (according to Google or Apple Maps). However, I got lost and arrived an hour later as expected. Did I mention already that public transport in Tokio is complicated? 😅
Anyways, the objective of the exhibitions was to let you experience the art with your own body. They worked a lot with mirrors, water and lighting to create the illusion of infinity and many more things in their exhibition rooms (check the photos). I spent approximately 2 hours there. It was really incredible and I can definitely recommend it. The artists have put a lot of thought and effort into this. 👍
Then it was time for lunch. This time I had to order it on my own but I was lucky. There was a terminal with English language were I could order from. 😊 After lunch, I picked up my 24-Hour metro card (that I had bought in a bundle with the entrance for TeamLab Planet) and navigated - this time without complications - to Senso-ji (the old temple 🏛️ of the goddess of compassion) in Asakusa. The Buddhist temple was crowded with many Japanese people who enjoyed this Saturday afternoon dressed up in a Kimono 👘 and walking through the traditionally decorated alleys, shopping and tasting street food. Actually, you could do a lot of Buddhist related rituals in this place: water purification 💦 for the hands, gesture of cleansing the body with incense smoke 💨 , lighting a candle 🕯️ … I participated in most of them. I also got my Omikuji - a randomly chosen fortune 📜 I have yet to figure out what it means though because the English translation printed on the sheet of paper representing the Omikuji is inconclusive. 😂
After sunset, I went to the foreigner friendly bar district in Roppongi since I wanted to make the most of my 24-hours metro pass. After a few beer 🍻 and some nice Sashimi 🍣 for dinner I went back to the guesthouse again.

Tomorrow I want to check out the Anime district and maybe one or two cat/owl caffès 😊Читать далее