Chris & Abbie

So for our first vacation we decided it was only fitting to head to Tokyo. We went for 4 days/3 nights and I'd say that was a great amount for the first time.

Tokyo was lots of fun, it was great to be in a city again and feel the urban-ness, eat delicious food and experience a new city. But boy is that town crazy! There are 30 million people that live in Tokyo. We only saw the "downtown" area, which was huge, but is only about 1/4 the size of the rest of Tokyo.

At first when we pulled into the city, there weren't very many people on the sidewalks. So I said to Chris, "Where are all these people I keep hearing about?" But don't worry we found them - they were all in the train stations! Seriously, the train stations are crazy. Tokyo has a subway and a regular train that run around their downtown. So each station usually has more than one line coming into it, plus in one area of town there is a monorail. Each station also seems to turn into a mall. The station that we stayed by had 3 malls in it - the shopping was totally overwhelming to me in Tokyo!

We had so much fun though, exploring and seeing lots of things!

SATURDAY: We took the bus to Tokyo, and checked in at our "hotel", probably more like a hostel. Tiny rooms. Then we headed to Shinjuku. Our hostel wasn't too far from here so we hung out here quite a bit. We found a bookstore with an English section, a tasty Mexican restaurant, Krispy Kreme and Starbucks here! No wonder it ended up being one of our favorite spots!

After we wandered around Shinjuku we headed out to see The Lion King, yes in Japanese. We were the only foreigners there, but we knew the story so it was ok. Chris had never seen the show so he just got confused between the African songs and the regular songs in Japanese. The show was still amazing!

But as we were watching it was kind of a little sad for us too. The Lion King has been in Tokyo for 10 years now, and watching the show made us realize it was probably because they believe in a lot of the ancestry stuff that the Lion King talks about. Just another reminder of the need of the people around us!

SUNDAY: Sunday morning we were so blessed to be able to go tochurch in English! The church is a church-plant from the Hillsong Australia church. The people at the church were very nice and very friendly. It was so encouraging to get to hear a LIVE sermon in English and to get to worship in a community in both English and Japanese.

After church we headed to Odaiba, a manmade island in Tokyo. It had lots of stuff to see, the Toyota Museum, a delicious Cheesburger place (with REAL beef), street performers, and a monorail to give us great views of the city!

We have lots of pictures to share, so I'm going to post them in a few posts.

One of our first stops. There was always a line out the door, but they gave us a free doughnut while we waited!

Muscat Shell Doughnuts and Mermaid Peach...we didn't try these!

One day we went to the island of Odaiba. It's a man-made island that is just over the Rainbow Bridge. You take the monorail to get there and to get around the island. We saw some great views of Tokyo from there!

Odaiba was really fun, they had street performers all around.

Odaiba also had the Toyota museum - guess this is a car of the future.

I thought the price looked so funny! 6 million dollars?!?

They also had The Statue of Liberty there...not sure why!

There was lots of interesting architecture in Tokyo.