A much nicer day today. Little bit of wind but we’re from Wellington, so no big deal. But lovely and sunny.

Last night was our final night at Tokyu Stay Shinjuku so after breakfast we re-packed, checked out, left our suitcases at reception and headed first for Shinjuku station to book shinkansen (bullet train) tickets to Osaka for the afternoon. That involved queuing but didn’t take too long.

Then we walked on to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building (Tocho). It’s the fifth-tallest building in Tokyo and has observation decks in both towers that are free to visit and are open very long hours (up to 11pm). The gardens outside are lovely too.

We took a lift to the 45th floor which opened onto the observation deck. It’s a wide open area with windows all around the outside and a cafe and souvenir shop in the centre. Tokyo is so vast – stretching as far as we could see in all directions. Here are numerous photos of the view (spot Mt Fuji):

We lingered up there for a while – too long, in fact – and we ended up doing a bit of a sprint to get back to our hotel, grab our bags, and get the subway to Tokyo station (where all shinkansen depart from). We reckon we missed our train by about a minute – we just underestimated how long it would take us to get through Tokyo station, I think. Nevermind – a quick visit to the JR office in the station and we transferred our tickets to a later train. And here it is:

Looks pretty fast, huh?

It really was. Although it’s hard to get a sense of how fast you are travelling. There were certainly a number of instances of ‘see a cool thing – turn on camera real quick – thing is already gone’. 😐

Here are some pics we managed to snap on the way:

About 320kph, according to google. It took us about 3 hours to go 500k.

It was very comfortable and the train was almost empty.

Arrived at Shin-Osaka station and took a local JR train to Fukushima station (a one minute walk from our new hotel – or ten minutes, if you get google maps to guide you).

Here’s the view from our new hotel room at about 5.30pm:

Tonight we had takeaways. Maeve tried (and liked) the allergen-free burger from Mos Burger, which is awesome because they have stores all over.

Tomorrow – Universal Studios!