Tokyo, Ginza, and the Akihabara Washington - June 29
We had to get up early to make the 8am checkout time for the capsule hotel, and my light alarm managed to get me up early enough. It seemed like the place was empty besides us, so getting a shower was not a problem. We ended up getting ready to go with time to spare and headed back to the train station for Tokyo. We walked through the Nishiki fish market again on our way to the station, but this time we were too early and it seemed that most of the shops were still setting up.
We had breakfast at Kyoto station, then hopped on the first Tokyo-bound Shinkansen that pulled up to the platform. Each of the cars on these trains is marked as either free seating or reserved only, and our passes only allowed us to sit in free seating. Only three of the twenty or so cars on this particular train were free seating, so we just hopped on before it pulled away and planned to walk down to the free seating inside the train. We got almost to the end of the train before we realized that we were going the wrong direction, but we decided we might as well continue and be able to say that we walked the whole length of the train. We did, and then walked all the way back to the front of the free seating and claimed victory. It was a little cramped walking through all the aisles, and we had to squeeze by the attendants and their carts at a couple points. Although I felt like we were disrupting things a little bit, I felt a little better as I was forced to essentially bow to the whole car as we went through the low doorway into each one. I thought it was funny, as it reminded me of how the train staff bow to the passengers in each car every time they enter or leave it.
After all that, about halfway through the journey, an employee came through the car asking for tickets. We happily supplied our JR Passes and he looked at them for a second before handing them back and moving on. After finishing up the car, he came back and asked to see my pass again. After reading it over, he pointed out that the pass was actually not valid on the Nozomi Shinkansen, which happened to be the one we were on. The Tokaido Shinkansen line that runs between Kyoto and Tokyo has three levels of express trains: Kodama, Hikari, and Nozomi, with Nozomi being the super-express. As it turns out the JR Pass is valid on every JR line except the Nozomi Shinkansen. We apologized and decided to transfer to a Kodama or Hikari at the next station but, because it was such an express train, the next stop wasn't until we were a few miles from Tokyo. Nonetheless, we transferred for the last 15 minutes or so of the ride.
Once back in Tokyo, we decided to head for the Tokyo Imperial Palace. It required a permit in advance like the Kyoto one, and as the deadline loomed nearer we decided to just wander the grounds and not bother with the Palace proper. The grounds amounted to essentially a large park, though at one point we crossed a huge, empty parking lot/roadway in the scorching heat of the day. It was quite an ordeal (one Brian certainly wasn't fond of), but we got a good montage out of it. We ended up having some ice cream near a huge statue of a mounted samurai, then heading off.
We wandered around for a bit, stopping at an arcade for a bit, and eventually headed for the Tsukiji fish market in Ginza. We got there mid-afternoon and everyone was just about closed up, so we decided to come back the next morning when things were bustling. Instead, we returned to Shibuya in search of a taiyaki shop we had found online.
We searched for the shop for quite a while before finally stumbling upon a sign for it on what appeared to be the second floor of a building. This was quite a climactic moment, as we had been looking for taiyaki on and off for nearly the whole trip and had been confounded at every turn. We were excited to finally be able to claim victory, and eventually realized that the shop was on the first floor right in front of us. We scanned through the menu...only to find that "taiyaki" is also the name for some kind of octopus ball. We were all disappointed, but Kirt was hit particularly hard. Disgusted, we all trudged off to find some place to sit down and eat.
We found a little American-style burger joint and had some pretty good food there. We took our time with dinner, lacking any real motivation to move on after such a heavy blow. We had some good conversation, but eventually decided to head off in search of a hotel for the night.
Planning to hit up the Tsukiji fish market the next morning for a sushi breakfast, we first looked in Ginza for a hotel. The first one we tried was full (the first time we had encountered a full hotel), so we headed to nearby Akihabara for accomodations instead. We ended up staying in the Akihabara Washington Hotel (part of the same chain as our hotel in Shinjuku), which was an awesome place. It was conveniently located right next to Akihabara station, and our room had a great view of the city. On top of that, the vending machines in the hotel had cold cans of Sapporo beer, which pleased me to no end.
Before we headed to bed we needed to do laundry, so Kirt, Tim, and I headed off to find some coin-op laundry places from a map the hotel staff had given us. We went to exactly the places on the map, but they were either closed or nonexistent, and we couldn't find anything. We ended up stopping by a convenience store for drinks and just sat on the street corner out front for a while to talk. In the end I just re-wore some clothes, which worked out alright, but Kirt and Tim decided that they were going to buy some new underwear in Ginza the following morning.
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