Saikourobyn - Robyn's May Mays

Japan 2020 - Day 3

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Our first full day in Tokyo, we got lost on public transport and went up a tall building, find out all about it below!

Wednesday 26th February 2020

Tokyo

Originally we were supposed to be visiting the Ghibli museum but they had decided to close in order to prevent the spread of Coronavirus.

Instead we went for a more traditional museum, we headed over to Ueno park where all the museums seem to live. We walk through the park first admiring some plum/cherry blossom which is conveniently located next to a designated smoking spot.

We found Ueno Park Boat Dock in Shinobazu Pond with some colourful characters in the form of bird boats with bow ties, regrettably as it was technically still winter you could not take one for a spin.

We did start a bit late today so we only had time for one place, the Tokyo National Museum. I think I would have preferred a less art and more history but it was still very interesting to look at. We were fortunate to see it at this stage as a few days later it was closed to prevent the spread of Coronavirus.

We got booted out and headed over to Skytree, on the way there we were on the lookout for food. We found that at Ueno Station there was a mall/food court with many places to eat including a vegan place called T’s TanTan the food was good but some of the decoration needed some work, the “vegan” books on the wall turned out to not be genuine.

When it came time to leave it we were denied exit from the food court, turns out we had entered a part of the station but as we didn’t want to catch a train from this side we had to pay a small fee to use the food court before we were allowed out.

It definitely took some time to get used to the underground trains in Tokyo, Google Maps was ok at getting you from A to B but there’s another app called Japan Transit Planner which gives you options for travel like shortest or cheapest journey although it lacks a map which means you need to look up the names of where you are and where you want to go so you end up flicking between the two to work it out. You can also tell it if you are using the JR Pass so it will prefer putting you on those trains, we only had a 7 day pass and couldn’t start using it yet.

The app however did lead us astray with no map to show the journey. We ended up taking a 7.5 mile 38 minute train and we missed our stop as I thought there were two stations for Skytree which there are but this train only stopped at one of them.

If I had seen it on a map I think I would’ve settled for having to change at Asakusa Station for the much shorter journey. In the end we walked from Asakusa Station to Skytree, where we got to see the Ashai golden poo to make up for our extended journey.

Skytree itself is a broadcasting and observation tower, you can pay to go to the top or you can do as we did and head to a bar in the Tokyo Skytree East Tower, where for the price of a beer you can sit and enjoy the view and you get to drink beer!

At the bottom of Skytree there is a large mall with over 300 shops, but only 1 I really cared about, the Pokemon Center. I was on the lookout for exclusive merch but I assumed that this was just a smaller version of the main store so I didn’t get very much this time. We also found a Ghibli store which partly made up for not being able to go to the Ghibli museum.

Finally we went up the tower to 天空LOUNGE TOP of TREE to get our beer and admire the view.

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