Since our body clocks are all messed up we had an early start this morning. Not a problem as Don Quijote was open 24 hours. Now, those of you who don't know what the 'Donki' is...well...imagine a 4 story department store that has EVERYTHING. Treats of all kinds, beauty products, jewelry, kawaii clothing, and some other products that I'm not going to mention here...we spent our first two hours of our day there and I have zero regrets.
So, it turns out that Japan's hours do not cater to jet-lagged foreigners. Most stores, bakeries and even coffee shops don't open until at least 10:30am. This does not apply to the conbinis (more on that in a minute), or the aforementioned Donki. So we found ourselves in a position where we had to kill some time before meeting up with Jonah. We wandered around mostly empty streets and alleys, all which would be packed with people within only a couple of short hours.
Back to the combinis...We've all been to 7-11s in the US. We usually grab an energy drink there, maybe some chips or a candy bar, right? Not here - in these parts the 7-11 is the king of sustenance; they have aisles of actual prepared food. We grabbed some rice balls for breakfast and they were actually amazing!
After connecting with Jonah, we headed towards the train station to Ueno in order to validate our JR Passes. The Japan Rail is a system where you pay a flat rate and you can ride any train on their line throughout the entire country, including shinkansen (aka Bullet Train). Since we're leaving for Kyoto first thing tomorrow morning it was absolutely necessary to get this done today. While we were in Ueno we walked around, but I kinda felt like Ueno lacked the charm of Asakusa. We eventually made our way back to Asakusa and hung out until it was time for our reservation for Tokyo Skytree.
Now, you can see the Skytree from many areas of Asakusa. And it looks pretty big, but as you get closer to this behemoth you realize that the Skytree isn’t just big - it's ENORMOUS. Twice the height of the Eifle Tower, this thing is is crazy tall. Once we were up there we had 360 views of the entire city, and for a city the size of Tokyo that's saying something!
Things to remember:
The 'cute' garbage men who were impeccably dressed in a blue one piece uniform who ran besides the small garbage truck, grabbing bags of trash and chucking them in. There really wasn't a better word to describe them!
Gabriel asking me what was for dinner when I called home first thing this morning.
How badly my feet hurt and that I need to buy new shoes...
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