Although we did see some sites, our first day in Tokyo was really just to get our heads wrapped around the layout of the city. Tokyo has an incredible public transportation system, but we still spent a ton of time just walking around and figuring out where we were and how everything worked. To give you an idea of the size of Tokyo, we found out that Tokyo has more people, in a smaller amount of space, than New York. It truly is a huge city, with a ton of people, all trying to make the best use they can with the limited space they have, and so everything feels very efficiently designed.
On our first day, we tried to focus on the Ginza and Tsujiki areas of Tokyo. Our first stop, which was located very close to the Tokyo Station, and our hotel, was the Imperial Palace and the huge Palace Gardens that surround it. Here’s a picture of one of the outlying buildings with the moat around it, to try and show the size of how big this garden was.
Additional pictures from the Imperial Palace Gardens:
After we left the Imperial Palace, we headed to the National Museum of Modern Art. Unfortunately, the Edo-Tokyo Museum is closed until 2025, so we weren’t able to go to that museum, but that’s just giving us another reason to go back to Tokyo one day. With that said, I did really enjoy walking around the museum. Also, by this point we’d been walking around outside for hours, and it was nice to go inside and be able to sit down for a short while.
Additional pictures from the National Museum of Modern Art:
After leaving the National Museum of Modern Art, we headed over to the Hama Rikyu Garden, but we were actually too late and arrived just after it closed. With that, we decided it we were tired and decided to head back to find something to eat and rest our feet. Speaking of food, this seems like a great spot to photo dump pictures of some of the food we ate along the trip. A big lunch of ramen, gyozo (pork dumplings), and karaage (fried chicken nuggets, basically) became our go-to meal throughout our trip. These meals were so incredibly delicious.
Additional pictures of some of the food we ate along the way:
Click here to continue on to our second day in Tokyo.