Our first night in Tokyo - and an earthquake!

Friday night was a great introduction to the city of Tokyo. We got off the Narita Express train from the airport at Shinjuku Station, which is only about half a block from our hotel. The tricky thing about Shinjuku station is that it is BIG - so if you go out the wrong exit, you wind up in the wrong part of the city, making a 5 minute walk into a 30 minute walk. Looking at the map, we'd figured that the west exit would be the most convenient to our hotel, so that is where we planned to meet up with our friend Marc. Unfortunately, once we made our way out there, Marc told us that after looking around, the south exit was really the one we should have taken. So, rather than spend 30 minutes wandering around the city looking for our hotel, and dragging all of our luggage with us, we opted to take a cab. It was only a short ride, and finally we were at the hotel. The hotel is really nice! It's only 1 year old, litterally a 5 minute walk to the train station, and it's beautiful. If you're looking for a place to stay in Tokyo, I'd definitely recommend the Hotel Sunroute. Our actual room is quite small, but it's still very nice, and has a comfortable bed. What more could you ask for? Jake and I were very excited to take a few minutes to clean ourselves up. I felt a million times better after washing my face and brushing my teeth. After that we were ready to go out to dinner. I'd requested Kaiten Sushi for dinner, because it's one of the things I've been most excited to try. So the three of us met up with our friend Billy, and then took the train over to a sushi place in Shimo Kitazawa, which is the area of the city Marc lives in.

Kaiten is awesome. Basically, the whole place is a big U-shaped sushi bar, with a conveyor belt going around with sushi on it. You pull up a chair, and out on the bar in front of you is a box of chopsticks, a row of tea cups, a little box filled with green tea powder, and a hot water dispenser. So all you have to do is make yourself some tea, grab some chopsticks and start pulling sushi off the belt! I wish we remembered to take pictures there, but I know we'll be back and I promise we'll take some the next time. The sushi was so fresh and delicious. One of the cool parts was that we got seats in front of the sushi chefs, and if there was something that we wanted that wasn't going around on the belt, all we had to do was ask and they'd make it right up for us! Kaiten was definitely everything that I hoped it would be.

After dinner, we decided to go for a drink, so Marc led us around the corner, into building, up an elevator and through a tiny door to a bar called the free factory. The atmosphere almost reminded me of an american independant coffee house. It had lots of book shelves, and some laptops set up for people to use the internet. But rather than coffee, they served beer and food.
We got a round of drinks. Billy opted for the big heineken.

It was really great to spend some time catching up with Marc and Billy. It's been years since we've seen them, so we had a lot to talk about.

After Free Factory, we headed back to Marcs apartment for a bit. Even though it's been almost two years since his last Tokyo trip, Jake still remembered how to walk from the bar to Marcs place. I thought that was pretty impressive. We met Marcs roommate Jude, and then spent some time talking politics and watching funny tv clips about Sarah Palin. Marc hadn't seen the SNL skit with Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, so we made sure he caught that. If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend looking it up. It's hysterical.

Then it was time to head back to the hotel. Billy helped us to navigate the trains and get back to Shinjuku, and since we knew what exit to go to this time, getting back to the hotel was a snap. After our long day of travel, and our fun night out, I pretty much fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.

Wow. I am writing this post at about 7:30 on sunday morning, and there was just an earthquake!!! Crazy, and a little scary too! It wasn't big enough to knock anything off the tables or anything, but I definitely felt the shaking, and it was enough to wake Jake up. It seems to be over now, and everything seems fine. Whew! How's that for some sunday morning excitement?