It has taken me quite awhile to finally get these first two days published from our trip back at the end of March-early April.  Will hopefully get the rest up in a timely manner.

Day 1 was a short day due to travel.  We landed at Narita airport in the late afternoon around 4:30 pm.  However, there was a crazy wait at customs/immigration.  The line for Japanese citizens was crazy short and those of foreign passports had a long wait.  They even had two separate customs areas and it still took somewhere around 1-1.5 hours of wait time to get through.  And then we needed to exchange our vouchers for the Japan Rail Pass, which came in handy throughout the trip but it was another 1 hour wait to get this pass.  As you can imagine, after an almost 11 hour flight, we were quite tired.  Thankfully once we received our rail pass, they also booked us on the train that would take us into Tokyo (about a 90 minute train ride).

Initially on approach to Japan I thought we’d have time to get to our hotel, put our stuff away and then head out for some dinner.  I realized after all the aforementioned wait times, we’d be lucky to find anywhere open for food.  Add onto that we were just bone tired and I wasn’t sure what we were going to do about foodstuffs.

After arriving at Shinjuku station (the one closest to our hotel for the night), I looked on the map and decided that it wasn’t too far of a walk from the train station to the hotel.  The wife had mentioned there was a courtesy hotel shuttle from Shinjuku station though we couldn’t be exactly sure where the pickup point was.  So after about a 15 minute walk, we arrived at our hotel, the Hyatt Regency Tokyo.  It has quite an impressive entrance with these very large low hanging chandeliers.  We  checked in and immediately headed upstairs to offload our stuff.  When we first arrived, I noticed that there appeared to be some restaurants and stores in the basement level (which becomes a theme in Japan).  We initially looked at some of the hotel restaurants (they have a handful of them situated in the hotel itself) but it looked like most places closed at 9 pm and we had arrived just after 9 pm.

So it was off the convenience store in the basement for food. Luckily they actually stock some food that is edible and not extremely bad for you.  The wife and I both picked up a pre-made sandwich and I also got a hot dog and some snacks (chips).  After eating some food and cleaning up a little, it was off to bed for us. Continue reading “Tokyo Day 1 & 2 (Japan 2017)” →