A glimpse of Tokyo

Sorry for being so late in updating the blog. We have had very few hotels with decent internet connections, and little time to update the blog because of a lot of activities every day. We are now sitting in the lobby of Aomori Grand Hotel trying to catch up a bit.

Update: Uploading blogs to Blogger.com seemed to be broken on last Sunday due to them running out of disk space on their servers, so we'll try again today..

August 18, 2006, Tokyo

We arrived at Tokyo, and navigated to our hotel using a printed out Google satellite map and a sketchy printout from the hotels webpage. The hotel (Hotel Edoya) is a japanese style ryokan, and quite nice.

The outside of the building does not seem very promising, but the indoors were quite stylish and especially the rooms were clean and nice. We have a four person room that actually consists of an entrance room, a very small hallway, separate bathroom and toilet, and two rooms separated by a sliding door.



The rooms feel large, although if they were furnished with western style beds instead of tatami and futons they would be quite small. A nice Japanese breakfast was included in the price (about 30 euros per person and night).

Tokyo Tower

In the evening we headed to the Tokyo Tower. It's the highest building in Tokyo, and has a basic structure that is similar to the Eiffel tower in Paris. The main differences are no huge crowds, a comfortable elevator going up along the middle, and a red and white paint scheme mandated by Japanese regulations for high structures.

The lights of the fashion shopping district Ginza.

The inside of the Tokyo Tower was illuminated by neon lights.

The view from the Tokyo tower shows how huge Tokyo really is. In every direction there is city, with occasional clusters of skyscrapers, shopping areas with lots of illuminated advertisements, or lakes spanned by bridges and surrounded by buildings. And the city continues on past the area visible even from the upper observation platform of the tower.