Tokyo

The sun rises early, at 5:30 it was already shining. Decided to go to the fish market we took the metro and saw the pink labels on the floor indicating Women wagon, as the japanese men have a quite bad habit of abusing when in tight places. the metro was full. Extra full. Fish market was nothing special, a market with lots of people preparing and selling fish, water on the floor, small kind-of bumper cars going around. Next we wanted to try the fish, so we found a small restaurant and went for a morning sushi and sashimi with misu soup and greeen tea, as always. The big difference of the raw fish in Japan over the sushi is that it is fresh and still tastes a lot. Plus, there were fish I would not guess the name. But ok, we survived.

It start raining a lot when we went out but fortunately we had took a mini umbrella from the hotel which allowed us to survive for 5 minutes before getting wet.

The parks of the imperial palace were our next destination. The palace was closed, we were sweating like I don't know what. Thirty degrees plus 90% humidity and a jetlag. Eva could not keep the eyes open for the picture. Then we moved to the Yoyogi park, where I washed the hands before enter a temple and we also saw the biggest shrine of japan.

Next to the park, at the exit of the metro we started to notice that, in japan, they have smoking areas outside. they ask to people not to smoke while walking and provide small areas with ash trays where people agglomerate to smoke!

We then walked in the trend streets of Shinjuku area, where the fashion is the top Japanese one.

At four o'clock in front of a small dog statue we met Yushi, a girl we contacted before and that wanted to help us with our organisation. She brought several travel catalogs (in japanese) and told us small spots in Japan that we could visit. We took note of some of them. Then she walked us in the shops of Shibuya area and finally took us to a bar with a tea ceremony. It was nice to see how to make a special green tea and to try japanese sweets. After it we talk and walk with yushi until her place, visit a japanese residential area in tokyo, where you almost see no shops and everyone uses the car to go anywhere. it was an area with small houses and we even passed by a temple, just like a church in our european standards. Finally we left her and went for dinner in a pre-payment restaurant: at the entrance a machine with few pictures where you put money and press buttons. We try to get an extra rice by pressing a 200yen button. Once inside when trying to get we more or less understood that we had asked for extra noodles. It was nice anyway this restaurant where we could see how they do the noodles.

A final note from Tokyo is the amazing number of beverage machines, everywhere.