No Tokyo Hotel

Tokyo – a place that in my mind is somehow associated with an equal amount of tall shiny buildings, people in crazy dresses and tons of raw fish. Oh, and right now, funky pink trees. Turns out the two days we spent there was enough to see all four. Plenty of all four, actually.

It seems that the term “Tokyo Hotel” is actually sarcasm: It took us over 5 hours to find a place to sleep (yeah, booking.com had warned us that 97% of all hotels were booked out). After we finally find a place to catch some zzz later on, we headed straight to Akihabara – or “Electronic Town”, as it’s called, too. We ended up being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of gadgets and didn’t buy anything, but we did get pretty much everything else.

The tall shiny buildings were there, for sure. And illuminated like X-mas and Hanukkah combined.

It didn’t take us long to tick off the second item on my mental image of the town, too: There were plenty of bunny/schoolgirl/manga girls standing around, trying to lure in customers to I-don’t-wanna-know-what. They somehow don’t like if you take their picture and usually turn away, but you get the image:

With that sorted, all that was left for the night to find was fish. Some locals pointed us to a U-shaped bar with no chairs, in the middle of which there were 3 elderly Japanese chefs going at it with all the raw fish you could possibly want. And we did want a lot.

After about 1.5kg of raw fish and a comparably small amount of money later, we left the place feeling to have arrived in Japan at last. By the way, the picture above was taken on the fish market around 5am – too late already to get a place to see the famous tuna auction (all 120 places gone by 3am, we were told), but still, we managed to sneak in and have a look. Until a mean guard kicked us out.

The day turned out for the best, though – the sun actually came out. Surprising, given the weather the previous days and the forecast. We did the only thing to do in Tokyo on a sunny day in April: We went to Shinjuku Gyoen park to see the Cherry Blossom.

Oh, the Cherry Blossom.

It was nice. Very nice. It basically redefined nice.

What an epic thing of natural beauty. That image alone made coming here worth our while.