Final Thoughts on Tokyo

Well, I had to make an international phone call today to speak with a gentleman from Cisco Systems. He was gracious enough to coordinate a convenient time for me to call him in California. Anyway, I miscalculated the time difference and thought that I would have to speak with him at 7:00 am, so I woke up at 6:00 am to get ready. It turns out that I didn't have to call until 9:00 am (Tokyo time), so I spent the morning surfing the Internet, updating them blog, and napping.

I had to check out by 11:00 am, but I was allowed to keep my stuff at the hostel until 7:00 pm. It worked out fine because the sleeper train that was taking Yale and me to Hiroshima left at 6:00 pm. This didn't give us much of a day in Tokyo (we had a late morning due to my interview, check out, etc.), but we managed to see a number of things. Our first stop was Ueno station, where we purchased the tickets for Hiroshima. Afterwards, we ventured outside to Ueno Park, which contained various museums and the zoo. (And Diane, no we didn't go check out the Pandas and their instructional videos—here's a nice pic of a Panda, though.) The National Museum was okay; nothing to write home about. I did like the building's architecture. By noon, we were ready for lunch, so we grabbed some pizza (Yale also ordered a Caesar salad) by the zoo. For only 600 yen, I was ready to go to the zoo, but I wanted to go to Shinjuku station (the world's busiest train station—3.29 million people go through it every
day).

A short ride on the train took us across town to Shinjuku. Was it all that I hoped? Yes and no. We didn't hit it during rush hour, so it wasn't as packed; however, it was quite large and the flow of people never seemed to stop. Other than knowing Shinjuku to be a big train station, I didn't know what there was to do. We came across a sign that said "Skyscraper district." That intrigued both Yale and me, so we ventured off in that direction. It turned out to be a great decision because we really go to see another side of Tokyo. The buildings weren't as tightly located (like you find in NYC), but they still have some impressive ones—one of which was the Tokyo government offices. Another building had a 30-story elevator on the outside of it that provided us with a nice view of Tokyo. While Tokyo isn't littered with skyscrapers, the city stretches as far as the eye can see; and, it has tons of small (10-story or so) buildings; truly an impressive sight to see.

By this time, our day in Tokyo was coming to an end. We returned to our hostel, shed a few tears (I hope you know I'm joking), and waved goodbye to Tokyo.