October 21st
October 21st, 2006 at 3:01pm
| Today is the last day of the trip we leave for Australia about 8PM so we have a lot to pack into the day. We headed into Shinjinku and caught a train to Yebisi which is home of the historic (didn’t look to historic to us with its modern brick and glass buildings but anyway) Yebishi Beer Park. This complex consisted of a lot of nothing, with a big beer hall come restaurant and small museum where you could see some of the history of beer in Japan. The centre had some good displays and also had a sampling area but because it was before 12 we and last night ended about 2 am when we ran out of liquor we decided not to partake. |
|
|
| Next stop was Shinjinku where visited the skyscraper district with the plan to go up Tokyo’s highest building the Tokyo Metropolitan City Building, this is basically the city council’s building it’s huge. Once we found it after about a 40 minute walk we read a small sign on the door saying it was closed 21st of October for some sort of electrical check, cant win them all.. so we wandered back into the Shinjinku centre. |
|
|
| We were a bit peckish so we had a look at the big department store and found there food court after 12 flights of escalator. Most of the restaurants were full with quess and the food was from the ocean or maybe space, so we went across the road and got a nice burger at Standard Burger, an interesting place, 3 floors of stairs to reach it and a broken japlish sign on the door saying something like “service table is by you and seating is located” it sort of meant they found a table for you, you ordered and ate the food I think. Burger wasn’t too bad, probably better than standard. |
|
|
| Our next job was to find Piss ally, this was the English name it had been christened, the Japanese one was too hard to pronounce. It was a little street about a metre wide and 100 metres long down the side of the subway line. One each side of the track were tiny little restaurants and bars, some only 6 or 8 feet wide and 12 feet long. They were packed with people slurping their noodles or sticks, The whole laneway had a haze from the tasty (or in some cases not too tasty) yakatori sticks cooking on the open coals. |
|
|
| We headed back to the hotel on the train and picked up our bags and headed down to the station for our trip to the Airport. Along the way this older Japanese guy asked Rocky for a photo, Rocky thought that he wanted him to take a photo of the guy but no he wanted a photo of rocky. He had to stand in front of the drink vending machine… Who knows, might have a fetish for fat guys or may not have seen anything so handsome? Gary had a bit of a treat along the way too, with an encounter of a large bear which was standing in the street waving to the passers by.The station was packed there would have been 10,s if not 100’s of thousands of people in the station.. It was like 2 MCG crowds criss crossing everywhere it was an interesting challenge trying to get the suitcases up stairs with a thousand people coming down but the people are very polite and tolerant. |
|
