Todd and I have somewhat of a tradition (albeit a sporadic tradition) where we meet in a somewhat random city that happens to be easy to get to for both of us. This year we met each other at JFK Airport in New York City. Now, that might seem like a excessively specific way of saying “we met in New York City,” and well… our final destination happened to be Tokyo. We just met each other at the airport. I had worked most of the day (a Wednesday) and then drove to JFK. The drive was surprisingly easy, although it did take me around 3 hours. Parking was easy since I paid the extra $6 to park at terminal 8 where I met Todd at the Airtrain terminal. Initial greetings dispensed with our first stop was to go to the TWA Hotel bar… which happens to be in an old airplane! They had moved the airplane piece by piece to the airport (I’m assuming when it was no longer flight worthy… otherwise they would’ve flown it to the airport) and made a bar out of the insides. We got a beer and sat down to chat for a little while.
Our next stop was terminal 7 where we checked in at the ANA counter. Todd happened to know more of the lounge access rules than the check-in employees (to be fair, they looked like contract employees, so not knowing nitty gritty details was totally fine) and we both got passes to get in to the “first class” lounge – basically a slightly more private area of the lounge. The food was good, but I didn’t have too much since I was saving room for the flight. We decided to fly our seats opposite of how we had initially booked them, which meant we had to do a super smooth passing of boarding passes in the jetway so that I could sit in 2A and Todd could sit in 6C. It might sound like our seats were far from each other, but we were just two rows apart, both of us with windows! These seats were actually the entire impetus for the trip in the first place – ANA had added a flight to NYC as Japan opened up, and each flight had an award first class seat (which we chose 2A) and an award business class seat (6C as our seat du jour). I had prepped with significant menu reading and knew that I wanted to order… absolutely everything on the food menu. The only “problem” was that the flight was leaving at 12:50 am on Thursday and was arriving at 5:30 am on Friday. So I had to strategically plan my eating and sleeping to allow for the maximum of both. After fourteen hours in seat 2A though, I can comfortably say that all of the things you can order from the snack menu are delicious. The only thing I would avoid actually was the ice cream. It was good… just not better than eating another bowl of noodles. Todd reported that seat 6C was adequate for making the trip to Tokyo in relative comfort (Note from Future Paul – I agree with this assessment after flying in 6C on Sunday night back to JFK) – although 2A was worth building a weekend trip to Tokyo around.
Well… what do you do when you’re the first people through customs at HND and it’s 5:15 am? Take a shower of course! Todd had done a lot more prep work than me and knew that there was a paid shower facility somewhere in the arrivals area of the airport. We were able to navigate there without issue, and the nice attendant was kind enough to basically give us an extra ten minutes in the rooms. Probably because it was 5:25ish am and there wasn’t anyone else lining up for a shower. We both felt somewhat invigorated to be actually clean (and I’m sure all of the people around us appreciated us bathing) and we made our way to the Tokyo metro station at the airport to begin the journey in to Tokyo. We got lucky with our first train too, because there’s a train that picks up at the airport and drops off about two blocks from where our hotel was in Ginza. We weren’t able to check in (not surprising since I think it was still like 6:50 am) so we headed out to the Tsukiji Fish Market – this used to be the largest fish market in the world, but the area where they actually sell the fish has been relocated and it’s now just like a little market with small restaurants. We scoped out the whole place and were getting pretty hungry so we stopped at a breakfast sushi place that didn’t really have a wait. The sushi we got was pretty good! I’m sure we could have chosen a technically superior place to eat, but we had no knowledge of where to go, so it did the trick.
Our next stop was to get some coffee – and surprisingly enough Japan has coffee shops that are pretty much exactly the same as the US. I guess I just feel that US coffee culture is so weird compared to the rest of the world, but Japan happens to do it virtually the same as we do! Although I think they give out actual cream instead of half and half. The caffeine never really had the impact I was hoping for, but I’m sure it also kept me going throughout the day. Our next stop was a little bit of a walk away – the Imperial Palace. You can’t actually tour the inside of the palace, and the gardens were closed to visitors since it was Friday, but we did get a pretty good look at the really famous bridge and the palace itself. The grounds outside of it were also pretty cool. Our next stop was close if we were crows, but instead we had to essentially walk the entire way around the palace grounds. When we arrived at the Science and Technology Museum we were very kindly informed that the museum was full of small children today (so if we didn’t want to go in it would be OK). Well… they definitely weren’t lying. It was a fun way to spend an hour or so before we got hungry again and made our way to Tokyo Station. Tokyo Station is a giant subway/metro/bullet train/other train station located pretty close to the Imperial Palace. Once there we had one goal – go to “Ramen Street.”
Ramen Street is where there are a bunch of different ramen restaurants (I think eight? or perhaps only five) where you order from a little kiosk and then wait in line until there is a space for you to sit. We chose to eat at the one that was advertising special salty ramen (while writing this post I learned that it was Hirugao and they serve shio ramen). Needless to say it was excellent, although we both detected an ever so slight fishy flavor which Todd really liked but I wasn’t sold on it being exactly what I was looking for (Future Paul’s ranking would put it at Very Good – not my favorite compared to others we had, but much much better than some). We had some time to kill before our next big activity (a nap at the hotel) so we decided to navigate to a brewery close to Tokyo station. Now mind you, we were underground, essentially in a hallway. Google smote us with some pretty helpful directions… “Head southwest.” After we recovered from laughing at the ridiculatude of that instruction we decided to endeavor to actually head southwest. We had a vague idea of which direction was which and just started walking. Surprisingly we did eventually find the brewery we were looking for! Although it took us longer than we thought because we weren’t really thinking off the third dimension. Namely the brewery was on the ground level and we were 30 feet below ground walking under it being very confused.
Afterwards we hopped on the train back to Ginza and meandered over to the hotel. I was pretty drained so I instantly fell asleep. I probably slept too awkward of a time, because I was pretty tired the rest of the day. We had dinner reservations at 7… which meant we had about two hours to kill after waking up and getting ready. We spent those hours just wandering around Ginza looking at all the shops and people watching. We tried to go in to a bar, but it was a little too claustrophobic for both of us. The restaurant we had chosen was a teppanyaki wagyu beef restaurant. There was a little bit of a language barrier that compounded with me my tiredness detracted from my experience there, but Todd’s report was that it was exactly what he expected. The lesson, don’t order filet, and share if you want to. The dinner experience itself was really awesome – I believe it is the origin of American hibachi, why they’re called two different things I have no idea. After dinner we walked back to the hotel, which made the total step count for Friday end at 28478 with a total distance of 14.5 mi. No wonder my knee hurt the next day XD All in all it was an amazing first day in Japan – to think we did all of this in one day! Both of us required a little help to sleep through the whole night, but we woke up in time to continue the adventure.
