Tokyo In Daylight - Shinjuku

It was one thing to get to the hotel in the dark albeit with a blaze of neon (or LED these days) I guess as you might expect for this town, but quite something else to step out of the hotel to start taking in this place in daylight.

Today's adventure was to see the Shinjuku prefecture.  This is regarded as the main section of Tokyo and is bloody huge.

Tokyo fun fact: over 3 million people travel through Shinjuku Station each day.

Today was a surprising 26 degree Spring day. Perfect for admiring the Cherry Blossoms and taking a stroll around the very traditional Shinjuku Gyoen [garden]. You would not have thought you were in the middle of Tokyo, except for the occasional skyscraper appearing from time to time. The serenity was perfect. Mum would have absolutely loved seeing these beautiful gardens, I had the feeling she was coming along for the ride today :-)

After a few hours in the gardens we trotted off to the Meiji Jingu [shrine].  We could not see too much of it as they are getting it prettied up as part of the Beautiful Japan Toward 2020 program in preparation for the next Olympic Games. Still a lovely walk and some interesting sights, like these stacks of saki barrels. YES PLEASE!

From there we took on the challenge of the Tokyo Subway.  OK, so we got a little lost but managed to find our way to where we wanted to go - to the top of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, the 45th floor. We managed a very hazy glimpse of the mighty Mt Fuji (too hazy for a good picture).

There was a display celebrating the successful Olympic bid, with the flag on display.

On the way back to the hotel we walked the back streets and stumbled across what looked like JB HiFi on crack!

Not keen to go back these as it could be expensive!

On the way home we grabbed some snacks to heat up in our room before dinner later one.  Yes, umm the cooking instructions... Well lucky for Google Translate [where you take a picture of whatever you need translated and it tries to convert it...tries], we kinda, sorta maybe got the general idea of what we needed to do.  The end result was very good actually. Lucky! Nothing got burned, but Ryan did have a nap, so I guess the exhaustion hit...as outlined in the instructions.

Not sure about the other snack pretzels we brought, Ryan liked them more.

Right-oh, off to the Seven-Eleven now to get some pre-dinner drinks.... 100 proof Smirnoff for $10.