Japan: Day 01: A trek through Shinjuku

Welcome to a series of entries about my recent trip to Japan. These entries will mostly contain pictures but will also have some of my thoughts about my experiences over there…

Hooray, I’m back from my trip to Japan and I come bearing pictures. I took about 2000 pics over the course of 10 days, but I won’t be showing them ALL here on the site. This trip was planned and paid for by my parents because I don’t have the money to take a trip to Japan (mostly because I spent it all on building a new PC recently) and because I don’t have the organisational skills required to do all the things we ended up doing over there.

If it weren’t for my parents, I probably would have never bothered to go to Japan at all, so thanks to them, I got to see and do a lot of stuff… AND I ended up buying a lot of loot which I’ll cover in later entries.

My parents and I left Australia at night and arrived in Japan the next day in the morning, it was a 10 and a half hour trip and although I like flying, being in such cramped conditions is tiring. However, as soon as we got to our hotel in Shinjuku, we got back out there and walked around looking at all the different shops and stuff in Shinjuku. Let me tell ya, there was A LOT of walking involved that day and it was only the beginning.

Walking around Shinjuku

There were quite a few interesting things to see, though walking around, it didn’t really feel like I was in a different country, even with all of the Hiragana and Kanji all over the place with little bits of the English alphabet here and there for tourists… and the fact that 99.9% of the people we saw were Japanese. It just felt like I was in Melbourne, it hadn’t really quite hit me that I was in another country, though once you start noticing the finer details, I did start to feel the difference.

After we looked around the more populated parts of Shinjuku, we just wandered aimlessly around the backstreets and the residential parts of Shinjuku where tourists normally don’t go. It was a nice walk and it gave me the opportunity to take random pics, but at the end of the day my feet were killing me. Oh, and yeah, naturally we visited a FamilyMart convenience store along with some other random shops.

Anyway, that’s the first day… we didn’t really do much of anything interesting aside from look around and do a lot of walking. However, the next day we do go places and do stuff that is a lot more interesting.