Japan Day 1

Ok... two posts in one day? Madness! But here's the scoop for our first day in Japan.

We caught our flight out of PDX to Narita in the afternoon. Strange how you can lose a whole day in international travel. The flight was fine. One screaming baby, but not terrible. I got the first part of a sock knit up. Brian had some Japanese beer. We watched Monsters VS Aliens.

Arriving at Narita, we purchased a SUICA card. The card came with a ticket into Tokyo on the N'EX train (the Narita Express) which went directly to the subway station outside our hotel. Sweet. The Suica card could be filled and refilled with yen for all subways in Tokyo as well, and has a 10 year expiration. We highly recommend this set up. It rocked.

We took the N'EX into Shinegawa station and walked to our hotel. We could have waited and caught a shuttle, but it was only two blocks to our hotel. We got a little lost on the way there, as our hotel is part of a complex of five similarly named hotels (Sakura tower, the Prince Takanawa, the Grand Prince Takanawa, and (ours) the New Grand Prince Takanawa). A little confusing. We managed to check in with a minimum of hassle and finally met up with Andrea around 7:30pm on Aug 2nd. We went for a walk, supposedly looking for food (which we never got around to) and had a wet, enchanting walk through the garden park attached to our hotel. The garden was gorgeous, the lighting was magical, the pond beautiful and the cicadas were impressively loud. It was a good start to our first day, but we were tuckered and went to bed fairly early.

More Day1 photos at Flickr. I recommend looking at them as a SET, as that's the only way they are viewable in chronological order. I'm making sets for each day/city.