Seven Heartbeats to Midnight: Day 1: Our first evening in Tokyo

We had finally made it!

Or so we thought. When we arrived at the hotel "Horidome Villa" at about 2 pm, the friendly hotel receptionist told us that our room was not ready yet and that we had to wait until 3 pm. Thankfully, though, we were allowed to theoretically check-in, handing over some documents and paying the hotel fee, which was about 30.600 Yen (about 340 Euros according to the exchange rate from August 2012) per person for 12 nights.

Leaving our luggage behind at the hotel, we took a look at our neighborhood called "Nihonbashi", which is located in Chuo Ward. We were really tired, and the humid and hot air did not help at all, making the one hour waiting time seem like an eternity as the only thing we wanted to do was rest for a bit. Walking along the side streets, we ate our first onigiris and bought our first drinks from a vending machine, something we had seen only in anime and japanese dramas before, not imagining how much we would miss them after our Japan trip.

By now, we realized two problems: there were basically no trash bins anywhere (except for those in front of conbini) and there were no possibilities to sit down and rest for a while anywhere in this neighborhood.

After only 30 minutes of exploring some streets and being too shy to walk into one of the many, many conbini, we were back in front of the hotel. We decided to sit down in the shadow next to a large building across from our hotel. People stared at us whenever they walked past us, apparently never having seen two tired, sweaty gaijin ~~almost dying~~ sitting on the sidewalk before. 10 minutes later, we went to the hotel and - yokatta! - were given the key to our room.

After about 29 hours with barely any sleep, we collapsed onto our bed, which was fairly small, but bigger than expected - 120cm, called a semi-double bed. It was big enough for us, really. The hotel itself made a good first impression: it was clean, modern and the staff was really friendly, helpful and made an effort to understand our poor Japanese language skills; the staff's English was fairly good, though. :) Inside the hotel were apparently also 2 restaurants, which we didn't try because they were rather expensive.

Our room itself was also clean, but really small, although I guess that was normal for Japanese standards. The bathroom seemed to be the standard bathroom in Japanese (business) hotels, since we'd seen it on lots of other hotel websites. To me, it felt like a closet, though.

For a while, we just lay there, tried to unpack a bit (which was actually impossible in such a small room) and wrote emails to our families back home, the latter only possible thanks to the hotel staff giving us the correct adapter for charging my laptop, since the ones we brought to Japan didn't fit. At that point, I have to admit that my previous enthusiasm about coming to Japan and finally fulfilling this dream of mine was gone all of a sudden, and I wondered whether we were able to have a good time here and come back home safely. All of a sudden, even though I had it all planned out months ago and had even refreshed my Japanese language knowledge, I felt so unsure and frightened of this big foreign city and country and the people and the foreign language. There were kanji everywhere, and even though I wanted to read it and understand, I couldn't. Although being able to use the ability to read hiragana and katakana and at least some easy kanji motivated me. Still, I felt really discouraged at that point.

Our messy room :P

After some power napping (or rather: after attempting to power nap), my unease and fear were, well, not gone, but had decreased, so we went to Akihabara. And really, we went. By foot. :) Since our hotel was located only about 15-20 minutes from Akihabara and we didn't want to spend more money on taking the metro, we thought this would be a good decision. And it was, in the end even though we were fairly tired, since we got to see more of our surroundings. That's something I don't like about the metro or subways in general: you never see the city.

Akihabara was amazing! Big, bright, loud and crowded; just as we had imagined.

Though going there in our condition was a bad choice; everything was too bright and too loud and too genki, for me at least. I yearned for a bed and instead, got lost inside Taito Station, which is a multistory, giant (for me, at least) arcade, in which going up is easy thanks to the escalator, but finding a way out proved to be rather difficult (maybe because we were tired, though).

Afterwards, we spotted a multistory animate-shop, for manga fans a must! This amazing shop was, however, very crowded and after half an hour, I felt dizzy and wanted to return to the hotel, but couldn't find Chrissi anymore in the crowd. When I finally found her, I assured her that we'd come back on another day, when we weren't as tired as right now (well, I was tired. After having taken a nap, Chrissi was very genki).

On our way back, we decided to grab something to eat first. There were so many options, but we didn't have faith in our language skills that night, since we were feeling kind of overwhelmed by everything. Therefore, instead of going to a ramen-restaurant or eating at the yoshinoya chain restaurant next to our hotel, we entered the closest Mc Donald's and went for some familiar food. At the end of the first day in Japan, I ate a Cheeseburger and a Chicken Burger (or chikin kurispu as it was called there) in Akihabara.