Heya Guys, arrived in Tokyo on tuesday morning at 9.00am after traveling for 12 hours!! Eventually located hotel after navigating the train and subway. Unfortunately, the hotel wouldn`t let us check in until 4pm, but luckily they took our rucksacks. We did a little siteseeing in a semiconsious state. Went to the local temple in Asakusa called shen-ji, there`s a huge gate leading into the temple and then a huge bowl of burning ash which you blow on yourself to bring good luck, there are also huge statues of buddha`s surrounding the temple. Surrounding the temple is a mass of little shops, selling a huge variety of items from keyrings,t-shirts to face masks. We saw two sumo wrestlers as we were wandering through the streets, they were huge!! We managed to check into hotel at 4pm and thankfully get a rest after our long journey.

Today we woke to a breakfast of rice (rice must be custom to eat for all meals!) to be eaten with chopsticks. We then ventured into central Tokyo, stopping off first at the Imperial Palace, home to Japan`s Emporer. You can`t actually enter the palace but you can walk around the grounds and enjoy the scenery. After that we decided to go in search of Downtown Tokyo, this search however gave us an insight into `Lost in Translation` - all the maps are in Japanese and it`s very difficult to locate areas by map alone. Luckily enough, we stood out from the crowd as `Lost tourists` and were given directions to `Ginza` and `Harjuki` local shopping areas. Japan`s shops are huge, the Sony centre alone is 10 floors, so we passed a few hours wandering around the shops, the japanese style is quite loud! Didn`t buy anything as the thought of carrying anything else in my rucksack was just too much. Next stop was Tokyo Tower which gives great views over the whole of Tokyo. It looks quite like the eiffer tower from the outside and there is a lift on the inside to reach the observatory. The views were spectacular, and showed just how vast as city Tokyo really is, we lucky enough to visit during the evening so could experience the view in both daylight and nighttime! After all the sightseeing of the day we made our way back to the hotel, passed the Hard Rock Cafe and had to go in there for dinner, after all there is only so much japanese you can take in one day!!!

First impressions of Tokyo -Huge, very bright, very clean, people are very friendly, quite difficult to navigate because of lack of language!