Shinjuku and Takaosan

Posted on 2011/09/23 03:49:25 (September 2011).

[Monday 19th September 2011]
Slept very well overnight - I think my jetlag beating strategy of absolutely staying awake for the first day worked excellently. Spent the morning in Shinjuku, not venturing too far from our hotel, started off by getting some bread for breakfast from a pan-ya (Japanese bakery), and then had a bit more of a wander around to do some shopping. We spent some time in Bic Camera looking at electric toothbrushes (our UK one is 240v so we can't charge it in Japan), and ended up just buying a battery powered one.

I also bought an Eye-Fi card - rather amazingly it's a memory card for a camera with a built in wifi connection, so it automatically uploads your pictures to the Internet whenever a wi-fi connection is available. It also uses the unique identifiers of wi-fi networks (SSIDs) to geotag pictures. I was quite impressed.

After a quick lunch (an unsuccessful attempt to find anything vegetarian in a soba place, followed by the usual back up plan of buying rice balls in a convenience store) we got on the train and headed in the direction of Takaosan, about an hour from Shinjuku on the Keio line.

Once at Takaosan station we met up with Chie's friend Yumi-san (who was at Reading University the same time as us) and took the chair lift part of the way up the mountain, which is always fun. From there we made a fairly hurried ascent to the top, followed by an even more hurried ascent back down to the place where the beer garden is.

In the beer garden I met up with Tanaka-san again, this time with hid family in tow, who were there for the first hour or so, before they headed off, and I then went to join Chie and her friends. It was a lot of fun here as always.

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