Goodwin's Gap Yaarh 5: Tokyo: Scratching the surface

After our painless Air Nippon flight and our first journey on the immaculate metro we arrived at our tiny Airbnb studio apartment just off the Shibuya intersection, famed for the sheer quantity of pedestrians crossing the intersecting zebra crossings. Sometimes it seemed that the whole 38,000,000 of the greater city's population was waiting patiently to cross. And most of them certainly seemed to be there at 11.59 on 31st December!

The crowds! The queues! Even for simple ramen bars there would be a long line, often sitting patiently outside on the little stools provided and this in the middle of winter.

Ramen eating in individual cubicles!

As for the sights, well, due to earthquakes and war there are very few historical sites in Tokyo and actually the general run of architecture is either utilitarian or ugly or both although there were a couple of buildings that attracted our attention!

Philippe Stark's Super Dry Hall and Tokyo Sky Tree

Locals refer to the sculpture on the top of the hall as the golden turd!

And of course the sights that are open attract the hordes, especially the Meiji-jingu shrine and Senso Ji Temple.

Sometimes it was the locals that were of more interest then what we had gone to see, though the fish market was wonderful even though we were unable to see the tuna auctions at 5am as they were not open during the New Year period.

We ate well, sashimi being the highlight and especially the shellfish. Foot long crab legs to die for!

Some things were less tempting!

Getting around once off the metro and main streets is a challenge but the locals apart from being great queuers and respectful of age ( confusing at first ) were also really helpful and often approached us, perhaps in the hope of practising their English. One teenage lad walked out of his way for at least five minutes just to make sure that we knew where we were going.