Touchdown in Tokyo!

Hotel Nikko Narita
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Me and Caro arrived in Tokyo at 4.30pm Sunday July 9 after a superb flight from Auckland flying Air NZ. Love the new upgraded planes with heaps of choices of movies and tv programmes! Yummy food too! Arriving in Tokyo, I was in awe the whole time, that place is awesome! We get off the plane and follow everyone else as we have no idea where we are going, and end up joining a queue, then these big doors open and we all pile into a mono-rail shuttle and get taken to the next terminal to collect our bags and go through customs. Customs was pretty sweet, no probs there, all of 3 minutes. All the guards wear white gloves and military style uniforms, must get a picture on the way home!

View from hotel room
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The humidity slaps you in the face as soon as you step outside and we are still in our winter clothes after having jumped on a plane at 7.30am at Auckland end. We wait for a bus to take us to our hotel, which incidentally we could have walked to it was so close, and feel like we are still at the airport as you can still see the plane we just exited from. We check into our airconditioned (glorious) hotel room and check out the view whilst exploring bizarre Japanese TV.

Beer vending machines!

Tokyo airport
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Barely able to function from lack of sleep and feeling hungry we venture across the road to the convenience store and noodle bar. The convenience store, SunKus(?) is full of cool Japanese snack foods and drinks, prepackaged bento meals and not a slushy machine in sight. We decide we need something a bit more fulfilling so check out the noodle place, which coincidentally is the only food place within a 1km radius. The place is chocka full of Japanese school girls, families and our flight crew so we figure it must be good. We have no idea what we order but just hope it arrives quickly and it was the best tasting noodle soup I have had! It had veges, ramen noodles and slice of pork, which meant Caro accidentally started eating red meat again. I am still having day dreams about those noodles, the bowl was enormous too. I washed mine down with a glass of Asahi beer, mmm good! The cutest little Japanese demi-midget served us as well. Afterwards we stopped in at SunKus and bought some Haagan Daas ice cream and I bought some chips thinking they were savoury pretzels things when they turned out to be banana and choc flavoured similar to cereal, good though. The ladies behind the counter used our transaction as an opportunity to practise their Engrish and read from a piece of paper attached to the counter, "thank you for coming!" Was so cute! I really need to learn some Japanese for the stopover on the way home, my miming skills are not the best.

View from hotel room
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With full tums we explored the rest of the hotel, the beer vending machines and smoking room (!)then feeling shattered and unable to work out which time zone we were in, we zonked out watching a huge plane crash in Russia on CNN, it was the only english speaking channel.

The next morning I woke up at 3.30am and watched the world cup final live on a Tokyo sports channel (Zidane what were you thinking). Then had a little bit more sleep before we headed down for our free buffet breakfast in one of the 3 restaurants.  The breakfast was amazing! There was a Japanese style breakfast available which made my tum churn a little, they eat things like fish and rice for breakfast, bleh! Western style brekkie included pancakes, omelettes, thin & crispy bacon, sweet pastries, fruit and cereals. I decided to go nuts and wanted to try everything so I had pancakes with maple syrup, eggs, toast and bacon then grabbed a bowl of cereal with fruit, and what I thought was yoghurt, but actually turned out to be potato salad! Why??? Why??? Why would you serve salad greens and potato salad next to fruit and yoghurt. It actually didn't taste all that bad really, cornflakes with potato salad, but I just did not expect it.

beer vending machines
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Later on we walked around the hotel and checked out the pool which we never used and the funny bbq tables in the garden where you obviously have to cook your own bbq, but what's the fun in that? Afterwards we were able to check-in for our flight to London, in the actual hotel, which was sweet so we did that and jumped on the shuttle to the airport. Thank god I didn't have to carry that backpack to the airport, I don't know how I'm gonna be able to cope with it around Europe!!!