January 1st, 2007

We checked out of the hotel at exactly 10 and again Yuka used her cell phone to find and book our next hotel. We agreed later that the next place was the best place we stayed at in Tokyo. It was a little hard to find (there are TWO FamilyMarts. This would have been helpful information) but it was cheap and had personality. It was run by a Korean woman near Ikebukuro station. Some older guy was watching tapes of Korean dramas, all the books were in Korean, and in addition to the sweet-ass free internet, there was all the Korean tea you could drink. Sidenote: Korean tea sucks. It tastes and smells more like soup broth than tea, but Yuka liked it. So it felt like we had walked too far and wound up in some Korean woman's living room. The fact that the Korean owner played some weird card game online through Yahoo! reinforced this.

Late breakfast at Denny's and that's not as lame as it sounds. Denny's in Japan is alright. Its a far cry from its American counterpart and the deserts are genius: take a big ass chocolate sundae with banana slices and other dope stuff mixed in, and precariously balance an entire slice of cake on top. Oishisoo. Soo da ne.

On Yuka's suggestion we headed for the Imperial Palace, because on New Year's Day the emperor comes out of hibernation and waves to the people. Imagine our disappointment when we found the entire palace had already closed for the day. I guess the emperor gets up pretty early to wave...

We sat down near the moat and tried to figure out what we still needed to see. I saw an advertisement along the border of our map for the Tokyo Met. Government Offices, located near Shinjuku, so I convinced Yuka that if we trekked all the way out there the view from the top would be worth it. So we went to Shinjuku and got swept up in the crowd again. We made it to the towers 4 minutes before they closed for the night and got some good shots of Tokyo as the sun was going down. While we were leaving the building, a Japanese couple in the plaza was training its dog to come when its name was called.

We made it to Ginza, which would be Newberry Street in Boston or maybe Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles, and walked up and down the nearly abandoned shopping district around 8pm. The only thing that seemed to be busy was the German-style beer hall near the station. We did some window-shopping and much more crucial beer-drinking. We headed back towards our hotel as we were starting to feel wiped out from all the walking we had done.