A very confusing map was all we had to find the hotel from Shinjuku Station once we got off the Limosene Bus, it didn’t seem that far away at all and it turned out it wasn’t but it was still confusing. We must have looked rather idiot just sort of standing there, with gigantic cases in the middle of an incredibly bust street scratching our heads.
Within a minute, an old japanese lady come up to us and asked us where we were trying to find, I was rather taken aback by her kindness and overall lovelliness as she struggled with the lanuage barrier trying to tell us which way to go. She turned out to be the first of many lovely people in japan, seems as five minutes later when we were lost again an old man approached us to look at our map and even went as far as drawing a line which we had to follow on it.
We managed to find the hotel eventually, and it turned out it wasn’t that difficult to get to it all it was pretty central. There was an AMPM store across the road, which i’d obviously later decide were the best thing ever and we later found that our hotel was also very near quite a lot of malls.
The hotel itself was quite lovely to say it was the cheapest one we could find, the lobby was huge and very impressive, and the room wasn’t as small as i’d been expecting and of course the toilet had various buttons on it to do various things.
The first thing we did was explore, a little walk down the street and across the road was Lumine which turned out to be a huge, rather expensive mall, and just beyond that I could see OIOI Young (marui young) which we saved for another day but made me very excited. The entire area around the hotel was busy, and bustling and felt so much like Japan. Basically, we were staying in the very middle of ‘Lost in Translation’ land. In fact the hotel in the movie was somewhere in the area, I probably passed it without knowing.
The thing that both surprised and pleased me the most was how little shinjuku sleeps, it ended up true of most of Tokyo but I’d never expected so much to be going on so late at night near our hotel. Firstly, most of the shops are open until 8pm so there’s no going back at 5 wishing you could shop for a few more hours, and most of them don’t open until 11pm so you can get a really good lie in.
But once the shops are closed the streets stay busy, and you’re wandering around in the dark feeling completely unthreatened by anyone despite the fact you’re in a completely foreign country.
Anyway, on the first night there we went back to the hotel and watched some japanese television, which wasn’t as wacky as I’d expected at first but was enjoyable none the less. At this point I was totally unaware of Tokyo at night, and what to expect or even what there was to do, but we decided to wander around anyway. Tokyo really is spectacular at night.
All over the place were views like this, everywhere was lit up and sparkly it was really amazing. Back in the other direction towards our hotel though, we found something that no one had mentioned in any of the reviews for our hotel and something none of us were expecting. A little way past the hotel were a small maze of streets that attracted us because of their lights, and they were filled with electronics shops and small arcades, apparently this part of Shinjuku is like a small taste of Akihabara.
It was 11:30pm and the streets were still full of people, teenagers, buissness men all kinds of people. And these arcades were no different, there were still people playing in them, mostly buisness men to be honest it was a little surreal but great to have something to do so late at night.
The claw machines kept us incredibly entertained as they’re filled with the cutest things, and this on the first night is where I probably think my obsession with gashapon started.
We wandered around the streets until about 1:30, people were still out and most of the places were still open by this point we’d probably ran up to every claw machine in the area uttering the word ‘cute!’ and most likely looked like complete tourists.
We ended up going to that part of Shinjuku a few nights on our trip, it was only about 2 minutes from our hotel and really was so much fun - in fact we saw a fair amount of claw machines and arcades on our trip, but there is something incredibly joyful about doing purikura at 2 in the morning.
this image sums up the entire first night.
