Day 80 Japan day 2 - Tokyo

After waking up from an uncomfortable sleep in a pod, we headed to the sumo stadium. We can get anywhere that we want via Tokyo by train for free with our rail pass, so we don’t have to worry about taking a taxi everywhere. That’s such a good feeling after having to worry about taxi’s as our only mode of transportation for the past 3 months. The first sumo place that we stopped was the main, huge stadium. It’s not really ‘sumo season’ right now though and there was another event going on so we couldn’t go inside. There lady at the ticket office who spoke perfect English pointed us to the location of a few stables where we could find the sumo guys practicing and living. They weren’t too far away so we decided to check those out. The first sumo place we got to was open but nobody was inside. It was basically just a small gym but instead of a boxing ring they had a sumo circle. It was weird how the whole place was open but nobody was inside of it. We felt like we were intruding so we left to go to another one nearby. The second place we found the guy at the door stopped us from coming in because the guys were resting. I didn’t see them but Kev said he saw like 10 huge sumo guys just lying on the floor. I guess we’ve already missed the time to watch them practice. Early morning is the best time to see them and it was already noon.

We ate lunch at a random little restaurant that looked good from the outside. I couldn’t really tell you what I had, something with vegetables and chicken that was REALLY good.

Next stop was the Tokyo Dome to get tickets for the baseball game tonight. Japanese baseball is kind of funny because a lot of the teams have very similar jerseys to American baseball teams. Tokyo’s baseball team is called the Yomiuri Giants (apparently Yomiuri is their sponsor) and tonight they’re playing the Yakult Swallows, another team based near Tokyo. The prices of tickets were relatively the same as in the US. That’s kind of been the case for everything in Japan thus far. We consider it expensive though because we’re used to being able to get everything for cheap in the countries we’ve been to lately.

We still had a few hours before the game started so we decided to head to Shinjuku, another area in Tokyo that was recommended to us. We all had been carrying our bags around all day so we really wanted to find somewhere to stay for the night that we could leave our bags at. That’s easier said than done though. We ended up walking around for 2+ hours trying to find a place to stay. All of the big hotels in the area were booked or somewhere we really didn’t want to stay. Finally we found a hotel that could accommodate for 6 people. It’s interesting how in Japan they don’t let you squeeze a bunch of people into a room. We wanted to fit 6 people into a single room with 3 beds but they knew that we had 6 people so we had to get two rooms with 3 beds for a ridiculous price. We were pretty desperate by this time though and decided to just go with it. The game had already started and we didn’t want to miss any more of it. So we got a room at the Hotel Kent, the most expensive cheap hotel I’ve ever stayed in then headed to the Tokyo Dome.

The game was great. The Tokyo Dome is similar to the Metrodome but about half the size. If you’ve ever watched a soccer game in a foreign country, where the entire crowd is into it and there are chants constantly going, that’s what this game was like. The atmosphere wasn’t at all like a Major League game. There were two sections of the stadium that lead the cheers for both of the teams and the cheers went constantly the entire game. When the Giants were up to bat, they would have the right to cheer then when the Swallows were up it would be their turn to cheer. Pretty sweet if you ask me. The Giants ended up losing however.

After the game we headed back to Shinjuku then tried to find an ATM before going out. Finding an international ATM in Japan was harder than any other country we’ve been to. There are tons of ATM’s around but they’re all for local credit cards. Finally, after searching for probably an hour we found a Citibank building that would take international cards.

Shinjuku seemed like a little busier of an area than Shibuya but we still didn’t have a whole lot of plans for the night. It also started raining while we were walking around so we had to find something quickly. We ended up going into this building that had all night bowling. The place was actually relatively full for how late it was. Even though none of us are any good at bowling it was still a good time.