Thursday 2nd / Friday 3rd July 2015
Flying to Japan!
We flew out of Edinburgh on Thursday afternoon and, after a few hours layover in London Heathrow, flew to Tokyo Haneda Airport with ANA. Although we’d been planning our trip for almost a year and were really looking forward to the adventure, I don’t think that it fully ‘sank in’ that we were on our way until we got to the gate at Heathrow and were almost entirely surrounded by Japanese people! Then the excitement really kicked in!!
David and I are pescatarian so tried to order a vege/fish meal for the flight. The list to select from didn’t have a regular vege option so we ended up getting one strict vegetarian meal and one vegetarian Hindu meal…I was impressed that the air hostess managed not to look sceptial when asking which of us (two white Scottish people) was the Hindu meal but they were very professional! It turned out that everyone got offered either a meat or fish option so we would have been fine but both of our meals were great – probably the best aeroplane food I’ve ever had. Overall ANA were a fantastic airline and I would definitely recommend them. Each seat had it’s own TV and there were loads of movies, TV shows and games to pick from.
Arriving in Tokyo!
Accommodation: 1/3rd Residence Service Apartments, Akasaka, booked through hotels.com for about £67 a night
When we first landed in Tokyo, the first thing I wanted to see was the toilets! They were as high tech and fancy as I’d expected with jets and fake flushing sounds to drown out any toilet noises! I wonder how the fancy toilets haven’t made it out of Japan to other parts of the world (or have they?) as they are pretty impressive. There are some of the old ‘squat’ toilets around but not many and I managed to avoid them apart from one time. Top tip if you’re equally eager to avoid this experience, look for a disabled toilet to use instead. There were a lot of squat toilets in train stations across Japan and usually a ‘Western’ style disabled toilet available. A lot of toilets also had a mix of Western and squat toilet stalls but even the Japanese didn’t seem keen to use them! Oops – a whole paragraph on toilets – only in Japan…!
After David had managed to drag me away from the toilets in the airport, we headed for our first accommodation in Akasaka. We got the Monorail into the city (which took about 20 mins) and then got the Metro to Akasaka. The Tokyo Metro is huge and, after we got our head around how the fares and map worked, we found it really easy to use. The ticket machines have a button that you can press for English and if you end up buying the wrong thing there’s a ‘Fare adjustment’ machine that you can use when you exit the Metro to add extra money to your ticket. I have a few Japanese Metro ‘top tips’ based on our experiences/mistakes:
- One thing that is really important to note (and confused us so many times) is that there are numerous exits to each station! Some of the stations have 8+ exits and it’s really difficult to place yourself off the map when you come out to the street. If possible, find out which exit you need to take if you’re getting directions anywhere. It would be really useful if Google Maps could advise which exit to leave each station from!
- If you’re travelling around Japan…pack light! We really didn’t follow this which we regretted while we lugged suitcases up and down all the Metro station stairs. A lot had escalators but many of them didn’t, and there were queues for any lifts. I’d probably recommend a backpack instead of a suitcase too but read somewhere that these annoy the locals more, if you turn around and bang into people.
- If you have a JR Pass, I think these are valid on the Tokyo Metro too – stupidly we didn’t check this and paid (luckily it wasn’t too expensive).
- And last but definitely not least – the Metros close about midnight! We had a mad panic one night when we realised this and had to travel across to the opposite side of Tokyo. Along with a lot of drunk Japanese people, we raced for the last Metro and managed to get travel half of our journey before they closed and had to take a taxi. I’d read that taxis were super expensive in Tokyo so was worried about what the final fare would be but SO pleasantly surprised when we travelled for about 30 minutes and it only cost about £15!
After navigating our first Tokyo Metro journey, we tried to find our way to the apartment…which wasn’t very easy. We wandered around looking lost (and probably also totally shattered) and were soon stopped by a helpful Japanese lady (who spoke English) offering to help us (this happened so often on our trip and I’ll write an entire blog post later about how lovely Japanese people were to us!). Our apartment was in a residential area so even the locals didn’t know where it was but she searched on Google Maps for us and pointed us in the right direction. Two Japanese helpers later and we found the apartment and were pleased to be able dump our stupidly heavy suitcases. I’d read a lot that accommodation in Tokyo is tiny so we were delighted to find a really spacious apartment.
Akasaka was quite a nice place to spend out first few days in the city as it’s a quieter neighbourhood than the likes of Shibuya and Shinjuku so gave us time to acclimatise to the new culture while we recovered from jet lag. We searched for good sushi places nearby on TripAdvisor and headed for Umegaoka Sushi no Midori, which is in the Akasaka Biz Tower. We requested a table for two on the computer by the door and took our ticket then sat and waited…and waited…and waited for our table. I’m not sure if being a Friday night made the place busier but we soon discovered that waiting outside restaurants isn’t uncommon in Japanese and generally is worth the wait. However, after almost an hour, we gave up – we hadn’t slept in a long time and didn’t have the will power to wait any longer. I’m ashamed to say that, on our first night in Japan, we got a McDonalds for dinner and then headed back to the apartment to crash (after spending about 20 minutes trying to work out how to flush the toilet…).