Our last day in Tokyo ended up being kind of a bummer, mostly because of travel woes. Our flight the following morning was flying out of Narita around 6am, and there was no public transit available at 4am when we'd need it. Since a taxi would have cost upwards of $250, we cancelled our last night at the beautiful New Sanno and got a hotel closer to the airport for the night.
Luckily the hotel was able to hold our luggage for the day so we could still do some more exploring of Tokyo.
The New Sanno
Our first stop was Ginza, the shopping district that's Tokyo's equivalent of Fifth Avenue in New York City. Spencer had heard that Tokyo has one of the busiest intersections in the world (like most people cross it per day than anywhere else in the world), and since our guidebook mentioned the famous 4-Chome crossing in Ginza I figured they must be one and the same. Turns out it wasn't.
Capturing the moment anyway.
Regardless, it was fun to see familiar stores, albeit high end ones that we could never in a million years afford. The highlight for me was getting to peruse the merchandise at The Gap! It's been a year and a half since I've walked in one, so it was a treat. It was pretty expensive too though (more so than in the states), so we didn't buy anything. We enjoyed lunch at a restaurant under one of the department stores before heading off to a new place.
I was glad we were seated in a separate room by ourselves because Shawn was being very wiggly.
The kids were entertained with chopsticks while we waited for our food.
When it came, Shawn was ready to dig in!
Mmmm, tempura.
Our final stop was the Imperial Palace East Garden, another recommendation from the guidebook. I had unrealistic expectations of this place, since I was fully expecting it would provide at least some view of the Imperial Palace. Unfortunately I was wrong.
The entry gate was pretty cool though.
We walked past several Japanesey buildings and lots of stone walls, with Shawn testing his walking skills the whole way. Then it opened up into a giant park, with a promising lookout at the other end of a huge grassy field.
Once we made our way over to the lookout and trudged up the steep hill to hopefully see the Imperial Palace, we were disappointed yet again.
Womp, womp. That cool green rooftop in the background was non-palace related.
On our way out, we explored some other paths and enjoyed the pretty scenery. One section had trees planted for each prefecture in Japan, so we found the one for Okinawa.
That poor Okinawan tree did not look very healthy.
The rest of the park was actually quite lovely. Some of the leaves looked like they were on the verge of changing colors.
While our stay at the airport hotel worked out fine, our taxi to the airport the next morning was ridiculous. It was literally a 3 minute ride, and the guy charged us like 1300 yen (around $15)! Spencer was livid and sent me to find a security guard to report the guy, since he'd seen signs warning travelers about taxi drivers who rip people off. Unfortunately there wasn't really anyone around at 4am, and he ended up finally paying him when another couple who stayed at the hotel next to ours were charged like 1700 yen and didn't complain. Such a rip!
When we walked in the door to our house later that morning, I was sooooo happy to be home. It was so clean and welcoming, and then we unpacked and turned it into a crazy house. I think it took me almost a full week to recover and get it all cleaned up again.
Even though our last day in Tokyo was kind of lame, we were so glad to have a trip to mainland under our belt. I certainly learned a lot about foreign travel and will hopefully be more prepared on our next adventure.
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