Day 1 - Shinjuku, Akihabara

We landed at Haneda airport this morning around 5:20am local time (6:20am Sydney time).  Caught the train to Shinjuku by transferring at Shinagawa.  These pictures at the Haneda Airport station show the excellent English signage.  We found most electronic signage and often announcements are in Japanese followed by English.

Amazing to see very young Japanese children in school uniform (with beret!) catching the train without adult supervision.

Once at Shinjuku station we followed pictorial directions provided by our Airbnb host to find our apartment.

The extraordinarily large volume of people darting everywhere very purposefully in this very large train stations (it is actually several underground stations run by two different train companies) is difficult to put into words when you don't have a clue where the "East exit" is.  We eventually found it by going down one level, walking along the platform and finding the stairs to go down another level.  Having our large suitcases in tow was fun, too.

But we did find our apartment.  Once we dropped off our bags we headed to Akihabara, a large anime and electronics district.

As our Tokyo Metro train arrived at the platform, the young lady in uniform bows to the approaching train driver, then stands on a wooden box and announces the arrival of the train and destinations into the microphone.

Some pictures from Akihabara:

The sheer volume of shops and items here are almost overwhelming!

We actually began running out of steam so had some lunch and headed back to our apartment for a rest.

This evening we walked up the road into Shinjuku.  The alleyways around our apartment are full of eateries like this.