Tokyo - city of lights and color

Tokyo - city of lights and color

I am writing a small travel journal for ourselves about our trip to Australia and New Zealand via Tokyo and Singapore. I will post this journal or memoir if you wish, here as well because it might be of use to someone going to those places. I write these posts in English as that way they can serve more readers, but otherwise the main language in my blog remains Finnish. Hopefully some of you find these helpful and/or inspirational :) 

Here we go!

We started our trip in Tokyo. There's over 13 million people living and movin' about in Tokyo. It's crazy how many people there are. That means every place is crowded and rooms and spaces such as hotel rooms tend to be really small. The funniest thing is that you never know what you can find when you enter a building - for example we just went in to one building - hoping to find food - so we pressed a number on the elevator and when the doors opened in the 5th floor there was a small Asian restaurant. Next floor can be a comic book store and then again the next one another restaurant. 

The best tip about accommodation in Tokyo in my opinion is to pick one with good metro and/or JR line connections. Understanding the public transportation system is a bit of pickle, but once you get used to using it, it serves well. Finding places in general is tricky as there are no street numbers in addresses. Buildings have three numbers one of which, if I understood correctly, tells the order when the building was built. So basicly two buildings next to each other can for example have numbers 3 and 27. Great! Needless to say we had a little bit of trouble finding our hotel... ;) We stayed in Shinjuku area which is the colorful Tokyo you normally see in pictures of Tokyo. 

The best views of the city are from Mori towers Tokyo city view, which is in Roppongi. The night time city view images are taken from there. We also went check out the city views from Tokyo Metropolitan Government Offices building (45th floor), but that was during the day and the views aren't as good. Mori towers is definitely better, but also costs (if I remember correctly) about 10-20€. Metropolitan government building is free. 

I used Timeout Tokyo when planning our trip - which is quite a helpful site. You can get hold of a handy Timeout map for example from Tower records store in Shibya. More about Tokyo in the next post :)