Archive for January 18th, 2012
We had a really nice flight from Singapore to Tokyo. Â And that’s coming from the girl with the deathly phobia of flying. Â Really smooth, beautiful views and the food was good too. Â It was a daytime flight, unusual for such a long flight, but I loved seeing some of the tropical islands and other scenery from the air.
We arrived in Tokyo just around sunset and began the adventure of getting to our hotel. Â Since we only had a week in Japan we decided to book one hotel for the whole time and just focus on seeing the city. Â It wasn’t enough time to see much else without having to race around like crazy and Tokyo is such a huge city we figured there would be plenty to see and do.
Tokyo is a very expensive place. Â Our first encounter with this was just getting from the airport to our hotel. Â The airport is about 80 kilometers from the city, and the convenient travel options are extremely costly. Â We opted to take the local trains instead, an adventurous move for people who speak zero Japanese. Â The subways in Japan take a little figuring out and although the main lines have signs in English, the smaller stations and trains rarely used by tourists do not always. Â Fortunately, before we left the airport we grabbed a “Tokyo Handy Guide” (free at a ton of different tourist locations) which was a lifesaver in finding our way around. Â Seriously, if you are going to Tokyo try to get one of these!
As I mentioned in our post about the food in Singapore, there are indoor markets with giant food courts all over the city. Â Since we’re not big on shopping we had mostly just focused on the food section, but after a delicious meal one day we decided to take a wander through the rest of the market.
We were in luck for our fabric project! Â One of the first stalls we came across had some gorgeous designs on nice cotton fabric. Â Perfect for quilting and so much easier than our searches in many of the other countries! We had trouble deciding what to buy as there were lots of pretty patterns. Â In the end we picked three that were thought were unusual or a bit distinctive. Â Very happy with these ones!