A Day Trip to Tokyo

On Sunday, some other new JETs and I went over to Tokyo. We took the bus from Kofu. It takes about two hours to get from there to Shinjuku station. There’s not much to tell – we didn’t do all that much – just sort of walked around and got lost a lot. We did manage to make it to Moiri Tower, where you can see a 360 degree view of Tokyo. It was pretty cool. Tokyo doesn’t have nearly as many skyscrapers as Manhattan. Most of the buildings are pretty low, actually. The city is made of up many smaller neighborhoods connected by a labyrinth of roads. It would be a nightmare to try to drive around Tokyo – it’s hard enough to walk. The streets are not gridded. In fact, there’s no order to them whatsoever. Most don’t even have names. There are just streets – going in all different directions. I hear the taxi drivers get lost sometimes.
The subway system isn’t much simpler. I shouldn’t say “subway system”, but rather “subway systems”. Yes, there are two separate subway lines. Not like “red line”, “blue line”, but two wholly different subway systems that overlap each other. One is run by JR, a huge Japanese transportation company that runs most of the trains in the country, and the other is run by (I think) the Tokyo Bureau of Transportation. They each have a ton of different colored lines going all over the city, but they are separate from each other. You need two completely different subway maps to navigate, and each one is ridiculously complicated in and of itself. It took us a while to figure out how to get around…

[Ok, so I think the pictures require some explaination. One is a street in Harajuku that had some insanely nice shops. One is an intense-looking bus. One is the famed crosswalk in Shibuya, where like, a thousand people cross at once when the light changes. One is a Kevin standing in front of a Masked Rider subway poster. And the last one is one of the views of the city from Moiri tower.]