Lost in Tokyo

Tokyo is a massive city, with millions of people all heading in different directions. We spent 4 days in Tokyo and nearly every single second there we were lost. There are infinite streets, neighborhoods, buildings, etc. and it is not hard to lose your way. Even though we didn’t have a guidebook and navigated off a small map from our hostel, we must admit that being lost in Tokyo is not a terrible thing. The city is safe, the subway system is good, and we eventually always made it home.

Besides Tokyo being physically large, it is also expensive leading to us spending 4 nights in a dorm room of a popular backpacker‘s hostel. We arrived on a flight from Ulaanbaatar connecting via Beijing and were welcomed on the hostel front porch by a Halloween costumes party (commencing an entire 4 nights early!). There were hordes of 18-20 year olds lounging in the common areas and that is when we officially started to feel old and also remembered why we don’t stay in dorms, ever. A nice young man spent the next 4 nights snoring like a chainsaw. Needless to say, we don’t have any plans to stay in dorms in South America.

So what did we do in Tokyo?
-Rode the complex subway system a lot....sometimes getting lost.
-Visited the Shibuya area of town and crossed the street at the busiest pedestrian intersection in the world.
-Wandered around the gardens of the Imperial Palace, although we could never really figure out how to get a close look.
-Spent a morning at the largest fish market in the world, staring in wonder at the shear quantity and different sizes of fish available for purchase.
-Chad broke his vegetarian streak and sampled some of the local sushi!
-Last but not least, visited the Yebisu Beer Museum to taste some of the local beer and attempted to read Japanese while looking at the museum displays.

It was an insightful 4 days in Tokyo and we only hope that we will be able to visit again to experience the rest of the country. On November 1st we boarded a 25 hour flight that would take us 11,494 miles to our final continent and to the country of Brazil. We spent a total of 5 months in Asia and it was time for a change.