Yea!  I’m back in Japan.  I arrived late Wednesday night.  Thursday evening we met friends for a birthday pizza dinner and on Friday afternoon Chris and I biked to the Iwakuni airport (which has great parking by the way)

and took off on a weekend trip to Tokyo.  Chris is having a hard time learning how to say Tokyo in Japanese.  It’s To-kyo, not To-ke-yo.  He just can’t seem to hear the difference and blames it on his Oklahoma roots.

If you’ve never flown in Japan it’s a real experience.  Everything is so peaceful and orderly and clean.  Even the tarmac is clean and orderly.  My favorite is as we are leaving, the ground crew lines up and waves as we go by

and then bows.  Can you believe it?

Here’s a shot of Marine Corp Air Station Iwakuni.  You can see some of Chris’ biking terrain just outside of town.

Chris had been to Tokyo once before after he climbed Mt. Fuji so he had a pretty good idea how the transit system worked.  This is the Rail and Subway Map we used.

Haneda Airport is a little south of six o’clock on the map.  From there we took the Monorail up to the circle, then a train out to Shinjuku at about nine o’clock on the circle. This took about 45 minutes.  With two million people passing through every day, this is the busiest train station in the world.

It’s about 1700 when we walked from the Shinjuku station to the Washington Hotel

and the streets were amass with commuters.

After checking in we set off to find dinner and ended up at a tiny place called

which happened to have great beer on tap – imagine that.  Check out this waiter’s shirt.

It turns out Rick Chapman, one of CBC’s owners had been there last month.  And check out this sticker on their fridge.

It’s a small world after all.

From here we wandered the streets of east Shinjuku soaking up the night life.  Every street

and every side street

was lit up with lights and people everywhere.

So much fun.