Tokyo

Tokyo isn't as "high" as I expected it to be.  I always thought that Tokyo was a bustling metropolis full of sky scrappers and intensely crowded.  The crowds are definitely in this city, but rather than being a tightly enclosed city of tall buildings, I found it to be a far more sprawling city.  It was more mid rises that dominated that landscape and it was actually much more open and spread out.  The streets were generally quite wide and there was plenty of sidewalk space for everyone.  All of this made the parks and the streets ideal for walking.  Hamish and I found various spots on the maps we wanted to go and off we wandered.  

All the parks were buzzing with people and activity.  We had come to Tokyo at an opportune time.  The weather was starting to turn, so it wasn't too cold anymore.  More importantly, the sakura (cherry blossoms) had started to blossom.  The whole city had seemingly transformed itself for the sakura viewing season, with outdoor food stands and small festival stalls throughout all of the parks.

Visually, it was a stunning time to be in Tokyo.  There sakura were beautiful and created an almost storybook or "magical" feeling in all of the parks.  With the lack of leaves and the sakura on all the trees, everything seemed so much brighter and more colourful.  I thought of many of the anime I had watched over the years and the style made much more sense now that I was here.  They often tried to capture a fairytale like image of Japan which seemed a bit ridiculous, but now that I was seeing it for myself it made a lot more sense and far less fantastical.

I got the same feeling walking around in the parks as I did around Christmas time back home.  This was the mood in the air and with all the people.  There were smiles everywhere and a mood of happiness abounded.  On all the of the grassy areas, there were sectioned off areas for people to do their picnics.  Groups of people sat around with their food and drinks, talking and laughing as they admired the incredible loveliness of the surroundings.

As it got darker, we decided to meet Bene for some drinks up at the New York Bar at the top of the Park Hyatt.  This bar was made famous by the movie "Lost in Translation" so we thought we would geek out a bit and embrace our inner tourists.  From the top, we got a truly stunning view of Tokyo, which showed us again that this city spreads out far into the distance but is actually relatively short.  We listened to some jazz and had some cocktails, before heading off again for some dinner.

Our next stop was dinner in Shibuya.  The busy streets were a far cry from the serene parks where we had spent our day.  The bright lights and the dense crowds were the complete opposite to the morning we had experienced.  This was the Tokyo that I had anticipated and expected before I had arrived.  The complete flurry of activity was exciting and exhilarating.  The lights and noise gave me a sensory overload and I couldn't stop looking around, trying to soak in as much as possible.

Not too far from here, we decided to end our evening with a few more drinks in the area known as Golden Gai.  Hundreds of tiny little bars and restaurants are jammed into a tiny little area, with each of them only holding a handful of people.  There was an incredible charm to the place, with each place having its own unique theme and giving an intensely intimate experience to both patrons and staff alike.  The narrow streets made the whole place feel like a miniature village, or a scaled down recreation of a larger bustling town.

Tokyo has so much to offer as a city.  It is an incredible place to visit and I never expected to see such a wide variety of things all in a single place, let alone in a single day!