Our first day of visit was Shinjuku and thanks to Isabelle it was a great choice as it was relatively light, 9.8km only 😉…

We firstly had to find our way understanding how the monorail and the Japanese Railway are operating, get the right tickets then the correct platform and stop at the right station… I must admit it is rather intuitive and we made no mistake and even got the IC Cards charged (local Oyster card). Kudos to the local as at one point in time we obviously looked like lost tourists and immediately a nice lady came and showed us the way!

Our first visit was the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building where you can go for free to the top of both towers and enjoy a beautiful view of Tokyo… getting there allows you to also realise that there is also tunnels with shops and restaurants and so an underground life as well, this was really amazing actually.

On our way back from this visit we stopped to get a quick bite and agreed to go to Gonzalez Lion Beerhall where we had a simple beef dish but tasty and in an interesting place… the first question we got was “smoking or not smoking?” Long time I got that question in a restaurant! Nevertheless there was no smell and I enjoyed my meal while Isabelle found too much fat in the beef!

After this light meal, we made a move to two other “cool” places, Kabukicho and Golden Gai which look like the “hot” side of Shinjuku 😊 it looked interesting indeed and obviously there are some culture differences here!

This was a nice full day of interesting visits and we are looking forward to day 2!