12 Hours in Tokyo

We arrived in Tokyo, Japan around 10:45pm, and took a crowded train to the neighborhood of our hotel. The metro was similar to the ones at home, but much busier for the time of night. The train was packed with businessmen in suits and the walls of the train were filled with colorful advertisements, mostly in Japanese but also some in English. We walked from the station to our hotel, passing people talking and smoking and eating in restaurants. The side streets were filled with hanging lanterns, bright lights and colorful awnings illuminated by the lit up buildings.

Hotel Edoya was on a quieter street, a few blocks from the hustle and bustle of nighttime life in the city. It was a very simple building and we squeezed into the tiny elevator to the main lobby (our backpacks took up most of the space). There were slippers sitting in the entrance to our room, and there were three doors leading off from the small space where we left our shoes. One held the toilet (the toilet had a heated seat!), the other a shower and a small square bathtub, and the third was a sliding door into the bedroom. The bedroom consisted of four mattresses lined up next to each other on the floor and a TV on top of a small, bright yellow fridge. We collapsed onto the beds, but were immediately pulled back up by the prospect of food and seeing the city at night.

Even at two in the morning, the streets were filled with people, who didn’t seem to mind the late hour. We were surprised at how many open restaurants there were. We found a good place to eat, and ordered a random assortment of sushi and other dishes, mostly by pointing at the pictures on the menu. We watched people smoking at the counter where the sushi was being made, and others hurrying past the restaurant doors. Tokyo has a lot of automatic sliding doors, and the taxicab doors open automatically too. When we were done eating, we got in a taxi to return to the hotel, but we had to guide the taxi driver back. It was funny to see that we had a better sense of where we were going than he did.

We got about three hours of sleep before we had to get up again to leave. The breakfast consisted of rice, soup, noodles, and vegetables, and eggs that we thought were hardboiled (we learned the truth when Isaiah tried to crack one open). After breakfast we walked to another train station and took the SkyTrain to the Narita airport. The train stations had escalators and those stands where you slide your ticket in and they come out the other side, just like we are used to, but they also had colorful vending machines covered in Japanese. This train was much nicer than the metro we had gone on the night before, and there were reserved seats. We passed by many apartment buildings, a large group of men stretching in what looked like a parking lot, a lot of small and traditional looking houses and then fields growing crops before reaching the airport. Suddenly we were boarding our flight, and leaving Tokyo as abruptly as we had arrived.

-Natalia