Japan - Tour Day 1 - Tokyo

Arrival day for our organized tour with G Adventures in collaboration with National Geographic. So, that means not much with the tour until 6pm when we had our welcome meeting. We ended up having a traditional Japanese breakfast at our last hotel and then proceeded to take the subway to our new hotel arranged by the tour. We are feeling a little prideful in that we are getting more accustomed to the very extensive train network in Japan. There are the local subway lines, the more traditional commuter rails (JR trains), and then the bullet trains (Shinkansen). We have ridden them all on multiple occasions. The hardest part is navigating the various train stations themselves, but Google maps has been invaluable. And, we are just getting more accustomed to how the stations let you know about the platforms, train car numbers, and exit locations. Most people are reading their smart phones on the train and very quiet. If there are toddlers on the train, most parents will take the children’s shoes off before allowing them to stand on the seats to look out the window - we are soooo not in the US!

In any event, after checking into our new hotel, we went to a very small origami museum. Then we meandered down the promenade along the Singawa River where there were thousands of jelly fish in the river and wood block art reproductions along the bank. It was such a lovely day, we needed to celebrate it with some ice cream! Then back to our new hotel, in what seems to be busiest hub of Tokyo, with lots of young and hip and not so hip people looking for nightlife. Needless to say, we are not some of those people, so we will be heading to the hotel early while we are here.

We had our welcome meeting at 6pm. It turns out that there are two other families in our tour group. Both families are parents with two older children. It will be interesting to see how the dynamics play out. We seem to have an experienced guide to least us. He is native to Japan and learned English in England and Australia. Our official tour starts early tomorrow, so time for some shut eye…