Travel log - A glimpse of Tokyo

The whole of last week, I was in Tokyo for a working seminar. Although the program was packed, I managed to squeeze out some time to walk around Tokyo. The place I was staying is Westin Tokyo situated in a place called Ebisu. A bit out of the way from the main action areas like Roponggi, Ginza or Shinjuku, but fairly peaceful place. Nevertheless, they have nice places like Yebisu Garden Place, a spotless office cus shopping place. Nice Jap food can be found at the 38th and 39th floor. One drawback however, was the language. Even the menu is restricted to Japanese in most of the restaurants.

In any case, some shots in the Ebisu area:





Evening view from my hotel room. The second picture is actually part of the Yebisu Garden Place.

No visit is complete without visiting the Tokyo Central Fish Market in Tsukiji. Since my firm's conference program starts from 8am to 5pm, a visit to the fish market at 6am was still plausible (This was done despite reaching hotel from Roponggi at around 3am!). So, here are some of the shots:





The first pic was taken at the auction area, where fishes like tuna are auctioned off to the highest bidders.

The second pic shows how the tuna was being cut into smaller pieces ready for retail sale. Notice the tourists around him taking heaps of pictures.

One thing to note is that salmon is not readily available, so relatively little salmon sashimi in Tokyo; tuna seems more abundant.

The work conference ended on Thursday, so my colleague and I decided to extend our stay for an extra day to see Mt Fuji and surrounding areas; we were also fortunate enough to catch the cherry blossom season in Japan. So here are some of the pictures:







Mt Fuji was also magnificent. We managed to hit 2020m which is around 2/3 of the height of the esteemed mountain. We were also quite lucky as the clouds cleared up when we hit the the destination hence a clear view of the peak....and here goes:



The tour also stopped at Hakone, apparently a tourist district - good for chilling out.





The second pic was taken from the ferry, a breathtaking view of Lake Ashi.