I can’t keep track of days… this is the night we landed. Our airplane landed early by a half hour, and we got through the trains really quick (thanks to Nik’s incredible navigation – Sean and I let him lead :)) so we had lots of time to wander our neighbourhood that night.

It was a little foggy, but this place is great. We’re in an area that has tons of little restaurants and shops, lots of people walking the streets. We found out today that Tokyo in general has lots of streets that are really only for people to walk on, and this whole area is criss crossed with them. Tons of character, exactly what’d I’d want in a place to stay.

Nik is very interested in eating the best food he possibly can, he’s done a ton of research and…then we found the place closed. Some more internet on the side of the street later, and we have a new plan – okonomiyaki at this place. The people next to us were friendly enough, but mostly we kept to ourselves.

This meal was a terrific first meal! I’d never had it before, I knew a bit about it, and it was in this great little place.

It’s like noodles, and an egg pancake and meat (in my case shrimp, Nik had squid) and you add miso mayo and the tangy sauce and man was it awesome. The onions were the worst part of it, and I loved it all the same. 😛 (I hate onions…)

After we wandered a bit longer, and walked into an arcade. A bunch of youths (or “youts” as my grandpa used to say) playing rhythm games of all sorts – drum games, button-pressing music games, dance games. We put some coins into this game that was really just a cleverly disguised punch force measuring device. I got the consistent highest, but Nik had the highest score on one.

Back at home, it was 11pm local time, probably 7am PST and I’d been up for a looooong time. I fell asleep immediately, but had a problem at 2am local, 10am PST when I woke up and swore that I was never going to be able to sleep again. Wide awake. Nothing to do but fake it ’til you make it, so I did my best and managed to sleep until 6am. At that point I got up to use the washroom and everyone else in the place expressed that they were also awake. 😛 We got an early start to our first full day in Japan!