Pinch me. We are back from Japan. It's a place I've always wanted to visit, but honestly, wasn't sure I ever would get to. Brian's traveled there a few times for work, but our excuse for this trip was our 25th wedding anniversary. Yes, it was back in September. But we didn't do much to celebrate, knowing we had the entire year ahead. We left bright and early on February 8th from Milwaukee to Minneapolis. Minneapolis to Tokyo Haneda. Our flight to Tokyo was delayed two hours as we waited for our giant airplane to get deiced. After a 13-hour flight, we made it to Tokyo. Brian has mastered the zen travel there -- even got some zzz's -- but I watched movies and was pretty much awake the entire time. Tokyo is 15 hours ahead, so the good news is, we checked into our hotel around 4:30 pm and only had a few hours to stay awake before we got to crash. It wasn't hard to do. We stayed at Mitsui Garden Hotel in Ginza, a major shopping district. Honestly, I've never seen anything like it. The designer stores and malls! We can barely keep a shopping center alive here, but they were thriving there. So much consumerism. It was incredible. For dinner, we found a little Shabu-Shabu restaurant. You never know what you are going to walk into, but it was delicious. Perfect for our first night. Restaurants are often not on the street level, rather in the basement or levels above ground. It was a little tricky figuring that out, but we did it. We went back to the room kind of early, so excited to be there.
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When landing, we had a great view of the Tokyo Bay Aqua-Line, a 4.4 km bridge and 9.6 km tunnel under the bay. It's the 4th longest underwater tunnel in the world.
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