Night Time in Shinjuku

Departure from Copenhagen on time and ditto from the transit airport in Vienna, finally then on our way to Narita airport in Tokyo in a Boeing 777. Bad thing about the 777 is that it has 3 seats at the window (3-4-3) and with a filled up plane that meant I got to enjoy a middle seat, fortunately my aisle seat mate was a tiny Japanese woman, unfortunately my front seat mate was a huge Polish guy, who had to put the seat all the way back to get enough room, which meant I spent the trip with the personal screen slightly up my nose and a slightly akward position when meals were being served. All in all it seemed to become the standard slightly uncomfortable and tiring flight as usual when going to Japan, but (there is always a but) half way a stomach trouble showed its ugly head. So I spent the reminder of the trip trying to avoid going to the toilet all the time and when I could, there were problems. Had in the end to give up to eat much of the breakfast.

Arriving at Narita the queue at the immigration counters seemed endless (queuing to get into the queue for the counters) but a very hands on guidance of some guidance officers speed matters up quite a lot. So in the end it took less than half an hour. But it still took so long that when we finally came to the luggage belt, there were just 2 lonely suitcases being moved around on the belt (ours), and one of them had been scraping along the edge that it may not be reusable further on (actually its it first trip, but anyhow it was cheap and may be it should just be replaced here in Japan for the return trip). The luggage handler seemed a bit happy to see us, because now he finally could shut down the belt. Smoothly through customs, they did not even want us to open the suitcases. But we had arrived so early that the travel service bureau where we wanted to buy our SUICA and N'EX rebate tickets was not open yet. No problem, I needed to sepnd some time on a toilet anyway.

Arriving after an hour or so later in Shinjuku, it suddenly turned out to be a small problem that the 'New South Gate' at Shinjuku station had been reciommended as the shortest way to the hotel. Problem was that it did not provide the street access I had anticipated, so the planned route walking to the hotel did not exist. Instead after some ups and downs (literally) at Tashimya Times Square, we managed to spot the bridge over the tracks and we found an even shorter route to the hotel. Thanks to google street view we had a good idea how things looked in the neighbourhood of the hotel, so it was easy find it. Checkin time was of course first at 14:00 and we had arrived early, so we left the luggage at the hotel and went to do some local exploring. After a short trip to the hotel's toilet of course, which was very sofisticated, automatic seat opening on entry and so forth.

The local Takashimaya seemed like a good bet for some exploring and at the end of the mall, a 8 floor Tokyo Hands has been built, so we went there first for some initial browsing, followed by a trip to the basement of the mall for world food (food in all stages of preparement, from raw to ready to eat). After some time there we decided to go up to the 13th 14th floor an find a restaurant to eat (my stomach was now giving me serious problems, and I was beginning to panic when I was too far away from a toilet). After some browsing my companion gave in, and we ate at Carmel, where I on previous trip had eaten their chicken omelette rice and it felt like a safe choice given my current condition. It was probably as good as last time, but I was really not able to enjoy it much,

We continued to go around a bit, but when the time approached check-in time, we went back to the hotel to checkin, shower and get a few hours of needed rest.

It had now become 7 in the evening, and we went for a quick look around in the electronics area, where there are several big Yodobashi's, a main , a camera, a game shop, a watch and so on  (all with several floors).

Additionally we found a dedicated camera shop (primarily DSLRs) with a whole floor dedicated to tripods! We then went for a restaurant in Lumine mall, but as there are several Lumine malls, Lumine 1 and 2 and probably 3 as we did not find the restaurant situated in the Lumine, and it was now becoming quite apparent to me that I had to very careful what  I put into my stomach (and Takashimaya was closing, actually it had been trying to close for an hour or so) so we went to some mega shopping in an am/pm convenient store. For what amounts to 130 kr we probably bought food n drinks that would have amounted to the triple sum in Copenhagen.

Late in the evening (it was nearly 10pm when we got back) the stomach stabilized somewhat down to 3 hours visits now. Looking forward to a better day tomorrow. Although we have already found out that our itenary is not going to be, we forgot to check the opening hours for the Imperial Palace East Garden which is unfortunately not open on a Sunday (as it was last time) :-( so we have to make some new plans, lets see what the weather is like, today it was t-shirt until around 9pm!