Mia-tachi no tabi - Day 1 - Finding Rich's hotels

First order of the day - meet Rich at his hotel. Not as easy as it sounds. After a nice early morning bath we set out and 1 short hour later we had arrived at Rich's hotel. Or what we though was Rich's hotel, but wasn't, because he had given us the wrong directions. He blames Google.

After a half hour we figured out that Rich was at the Chiba Hotel Washington and not the Tokyo A Hotel Washington. Sadly, we did not have an address or internet. I tried turning on cellular, but got no service. So we asked the nice lady at the desk, who printed directions for us. That got us to Chiba station. There we asked the nice guy at the window for directions to the hotel. He didn't speak English, but understood enough to get us a map that I then took a photo of. Note here that I should have been able ask for help in Japanese, except I didn't know the word for 'address'.

It was about a 5 min walk and we were finally reunited with Rich - 4 hours after setting off from the airport. He was really bored waiting for us. Randomness - here is a manhole cover:

We left our luggage at his hotel and went to the Tokyo Game Show 2013. 

There were lots of people.

It was loud, hot, crowded, also crowded, and there were lots of people. It was interesting. But with everything in Japanese and very little knowledge of games, it was kind of hard to understand what was going on. We wandered through all 4 convention halls, seeing demos

and exhibits:

And after about an hour we were done. We then went in search of coffee milk for me and found a 7-11 in this really nice building

Then we went and picked our luggage and began the 2 hour journey to our hotel. We arrived, eventually, and were immediently impressed with the service. The hotel room is a little worn, but perfectly comfortable 

And though it felt really late at night, it was only 6, so we went back out for dinner. There is a free shuttle bus between our hotel and the station every 15 minutes, which is really nice. We looked at a few restaurants, and ended up eating at the first one. The food was plentiful and excellent at a reasonable price.

After dinner we finally were able to prepare for sweet, sweet slumber. We actually managed to stay up until after 9:30, so jet lag has been defeated!