Tokyo Bound

On Friday afternoon, directly after classes had ended for the day, a friend and I boarded the bullet train for Tokyo. For my spring break, I had decided to go see Tokyo, even though I’d only have a couple days, since I couldn’t dance class on Tuesday in good conscience. After a comfortable 3-hour ride, we arrived in Tokyo station, which was quite daunting. Even after we found our way out of the bullet train terminal to where we could catch the subway (not an easy task), finding which train line to take was not obvious. I have often said that the streets in Boston were planned by wandering cows, and I have to say that they seem to have enlisted the same cows to plan the Tokyo subway system. The map looks like a pot of spaghetti. In addition, for all that Tokyo is a very international city, most all of the maps had the names of stops only in characters, instead of written out in roman letters as they are in Kyoto. Luckily, my friend had been to Tokyo before over winter break and was thus able to get us to Asakusa, where our hotel was. Once we had checked in and dried off a bit (it had been driving rain ever since we got to Tokyo) we headed out once more to find some dinner, which we finally managed in a diner sort of place in one of the massive buildings along the main street. On our way back from dinner we passed a tank of fish outside of a restaurant where they presumably comprised the house specialty. They looked a bit like a sort of puffer-fish that I’ve seen before in Hawaii, which is to say that they were rather boxy with little fins on either side and a mottled shade of grey. These fish did not have a very large tank, but on one end of it was a bubbler that created a bit of a current. The fish seemed to find this very amusing: they would swim up to the bubbler, stick their ‘face’ in it, and get whooshed up towards the top of the tank, usually getting turned upside-down in the process. I watched this several times before my friend said it was time to go back to the hotel.
-One can buy reserved seat tickets on the bullet train for extra money, but we had no problems finding seats together in the non-reserved car.
-I bought a map immediately upon arriving in Tokyo, but it did not prove in the least bit helpful. Instead, we received a free map from our hotel, which we used in conjunction with the subway map that came in the back of my friend’s Japan guidebook.
-I have never before this met fish with a hobby.