Day 1: Shinjuko

Day one was spent in Shinjuku, where our hotel is located. Unfortunately, lots of attractions use Monday as their day off so most of the day was spent wandering the streets and finding interesting museums, alleyways, and karaoke bars to come back to later in the week.


We hopped onto a tour for the afternoon which was not the most exciting but did tour us through many of the different shopping districts, each specializing in thousands of stores selling millions of varieties of mostly useless crap.


Tokyo lives up to its image when the Sun goes down: shops overflowing with noise and tacky merchandise, with throngs of people and neon everywhere. The real treat was finding, within steps of the neon megabuildings, tiny back alleys where vendors barbecued skewers of meat in impossibly small stalls.


The night was capped off with drinks in the world's narrowest three-story bar, which solved its dimensional dilemma for second-floor patrons in true Japanese style: Holler your order at the bartender through the hole in the ground and he passes the drinks back up through said hole.


The real trick was making it out of the bar without falling through the hole after a few pops.

Tokyo Toilets Don't Disappoint

So far, Tokyo lives up to the hype. I'm not talking about the teeming masses or the neon everywhere; I'm talking about the toilets!

The toilets in our hotel lobby washroom are fantastic. The lid automatically raises to greet you as you enter the stall. Warm air is fanned across your nether-regions as you, ahem, well, you know. The toilet has no less than fifteen controls:



Unfortunately, none of them have any English and none of them are obviously "flush". You get one free automatic flush when you stand up, but after that you're playing with your life. The best bet is to abandon the stall with unflushed TP rather than risk hitting the "towering fountain of loo water" button.

One week!

One week until we leave for Japan. In the meantime, why not enjoy some Styx?