My journey starts on Friday, the 09.02.2018 in Zurich, at 13:00 PM (UTC+01:00), when Manuel and got on the flight to Tokyo. The next day at 09:00 AM (UTC+09:00), after a 12-hour flight – which was boring as fuck, sleeping would have been a luxury, but at least the food was nice – we arrived at Narita Airport, quite a bit outside of Tokyo. So there we were, an Austrian girl and a Swiss guy, who have both never been to Japan or even Asia, standing in the middle of the airport, not really knowing where to go. Eventually, we figured it out and got on the bus to Tokyo central station. Still not knowing where to next and only with limited internet access, we just wandered around in the surrounding area, in and out of random stores, our backpacks locked away safely at Tokyo station. That way, we got a first impression of what the city is like, however we quickly realized that we needed more of a plan to go on, since we weren’t getting anywhere this way.
The next time we had WIFI, we decided to go to Dream Palace, which was supposed to be pretty close to our current location. On the way there however, we came across the National Film Center (which is labelled as National Museum of Modern Art, so so at first that’s what we thought we’ll see) with a permanent exhibition about the history of Japanese film (from black & white to colour to talkies to anime) and the temporary part “Film History in Posters: Science Fiction and Monster Films”.
Afterwards, we picked up our luggage, checked in at the hostel and fell dead asleep for one or two hours since we were completely exhausted. Waking up, we decided to take the subway into town to eat something, which would have been perfectly fine, if we had planned it correctly. Instead, we got out at Ginza and tried to find a decently cheap restaurant. Awful idea. However, that way we got to see some really really pretty places at night-time.
After realizing that we won’t find any affordable restaurants in that area, we took the subway 3 stations up north and kept on looking there. Soon, we found a really nice small place in some side street and finally got to order our well-deserved dinner. We both had a bowl of Ramen and Japanese dumplings (iirc, they are called Gyoza). It was absolutely delicious, but also a LOT. By that I mean neither of us was even close to eating up. The woman at the table next to us (a Canadian, who was there with a guy from the UK), asked me if she could mix us some sauce to dunk the Gyozas in, with ingredients standing on the table. We talked for some while afterwards, she was all ears when I told her I was planning to go to Canada (she was especially enthusiastic about Vancouver, I wonder why…) and gave me some tips on what are the must-sees there (I hope I’ll remember at least some of them).