Ohayo Tokyo!

It's morning in Shinjuku and I've been awake for an hour. This sounds like jet lag, but it's not. I just woke up really early.

From my hotel window it's a bit difficult to actually see anything. I'm on the eleventh floor, so most building here tower above me. I can see the sky between two skyscrapers, though, and it looks grey. The pavement below is still wet from the night before. I'm guessing it rained.

Despite this I'm actually quite excited to be here. Not in Tokyo, per se, but in Japan. Tokyo is, at the end of the day, just another city to me. I've been in many cities before and after a while they tend to blend together a bit. Some people talk about cities as having vast, diverse personalities, but I've never thought so myself. I tend to see cities as urban sprawl with a little bit of character in a few select spots.

Case in point: what is Shinjuku known for? A subway station so busy that station attendants have to actually shove passengers into the subway by hand. Otherwise, the passengers would never get in. What is the rest of the area, though? Largely, it appears to be a collection of hotels and office buildings. There is a small network of streets near my hotel that light up at night, but it seems that there is not much else.

Last night we went into that network to wander in the Tokyo night. It was quite interesting to watch the Japanese walk about in what I always thought of as a stereotypical manner. There were even guys with arashi-style facemasks. And in the izakaya that we went to for dinner, there was an after-work enkai underway. To see all these things right before me... it felt almost like I was watching TV. Talk about strange.

At any rate, it's time for breakfast now. I wonder what will be there?

~Jeffles