Takeshiba, Tokyo, Japan

We landed in Tokyo at 3:30 p.m. local time, and cleared immigration and customs fairly quickly and without incident. We then stopped at a traveller information booth and learned that we could take a bus "Hotel Limosine" to our hotel for only 3,000 Yen each. Don't panic, that's only about $25 USD. Good news considering we knew from our research that a taxi or 'hire car' would cost at least 17,000 Yen. And even better news, we found a bag storage service that would keep our heavier "Yap" bag for four days, so we wouldn't have to haul it into Tokyo with us, which is about 60 km due West of the Airport. I'm just hoping we can find it again Saturday morning. ;-).

All that done, it was still only 4:20 p.m. and we went outside to wait for the bus, which promptly arrived on schedule at 4:50 p.m. With this being a fairly northern climate in mid-late Fall, we didn't have but an hour or so of daylight left. And that faded pretty quickly on the drive to town. But then Tokyo at night is really pretty. There are at least two, huge ferris wheels (giant sky wheels on our hotel map) which were lit with rainbow colors in a never-ending changing pattern. The most brilliant is nearby our hotel but we can't see it from our window.

After we checked in, got settled a little bit - found an episode of Stargate, in either Japanese or original English broadcast - we left in search of food. The concierge instructed us to "Please go to next stop" on the monorail line to Shiodome, for many options of inexpensive dining. We passed by "Drunk Daves", Chinese, Italian, and Indian places before daring to enter and dine at a sushi bar. We sat right in front the guy preparing the food, and behind him was a live fish tank. It was an interesting experiment in communication, but we managed to order some "most fatty tuna", a tuna roll, and shrimp roll. It was all very good.

It is now Thursday morning here and it looks like a beautiful, sunny day. So we'd best be off on our explorations. More later...