Tokyo Jet lag and Sakura (cherry blossom)

Looking down onto the hotel garden

View from our bedroom window

Well we arrived ok, with little delay or fuss. In fact the flight was superb, the in-flight food was surprisingly delicious, and Club World was luxurious. Lovely!

We got to Narita airport at about 10:00 am on Thursday. We got the hotel bus to the New Otani and checked in with no problems.

We had lunch at one of Jases's favourite lunch spots. I can't remember the name of the restaurant - it's the something lion. I tried out my very basic Japanese but the waiter seemed to understand me. Jase and I had Katsu Curry, which is strips of pork in breadcrums, on rice with some dark, sweet Japanese curry sauce. The meal was delicious.

We then went for a walk and stumbled across a memorial garden full of beautiful trees which were labeled in English as well as Japanese. Most were native to Japan and trees I was unfamiliar with. The garden was perfectly peaceful in dappled leaf light.

We then went to the 400 year old gardens of our hotel. They were landscaped by one of the great Shogun's of the 16th Century. Our hotel room overlooks the gardens which include streams and ponds, waterfalls, red Japanese bridges, cherry trees and other colourful but restrained flowers. The park was busy with hotel guests and tourists but that did not spoil its beauty. The ponds and streams are full of Coi Carp who are huge and range in colours from black to red, gold and salmon pink. The carp are more attention seeking than friendly but they gather round your shadow if you look down at them, they then stick there heads out of the water and gulp as if waiting to be fed. Not a pretty sight.

My first impressions of Tokyo are:
Everything s clean and sparkley
Everyone is really polite and very quiet
Lots of people wear face masks to protect others from their germs, if they have a cold. (That is a little hard to take at first as in Britain we only see images of people in Asia wearing face masks if there is a bird flu or sarrs scare, or if they are characters from an apocalyptic killer bug drama.)
The trees and gardens are incredibly beautiful. The cherry blossum (sakura) is everywhere on the trees, floating through the air and settling on the ground like delicate pink snow, or firework debris in Amsterdam after new years eve!