Our two kids seemed a lot more excited about flying on our national airline than the actual trip itself. Oh, they were of course excited about going to Japan for the first time, seeing snow, enjoying cold weather (again) – but the experience of being able to watch in-flight movies for six hours was pretty much the one thing they looked forward to more than anything else. Our Singapore – Tokyo Haneda SQ flight took off and landed on time, and was for the most part, a smooth flight with just the most mild bumps along the way. Immigration took a while as there were just a half-dozen counters to clear the several hundred arriving visitors in the queue, but once that was done, we hopped into a cab for a the short six minute ride to our place of stay – Hotel MYSTAYS Haneda.
I’ll write separately about the hotel at the end of this trip. One disadvantage of staying in this property is that it’s quite some distance from the ‘happening’ areas of Tokyo – e.g. Shinjuku, or even downtown Tokyo itself. Still, no visit to Tokyo is complete without at least checking out Shinjuku and seeing just why the train station is regarded the world’s busiest railway station complex. The train station indeed has so many intersecting lines and near bursting with crowds that it took us a while to figure out the right trains to get from where we were – near the very quiet suburban Anamori-inari Station – to the mass organized chaos at Shinjuku Station.
Credit to the wife who found and brought us to a small family-oriented tonkatsu restaurant – Pork Cutlet Usaku – that’s neatly tucked away on a side-road, and whose only signage is a non-attention grabbing menu-board at the entrance to the third floor restaurant. There’s an English menu supplied on request, and the two lasses could manage passable English too. Interestingly, I overheard the two waitresses conversing in the occasional mandarin too. We had a tonkatsu sirloion pork (1600¥), tonkatsu lean pork (1000¥), and the curry pork (750¥) – and aside from the standard rice and sliced cabbage refills, there was also complimentary coffee too. H quipped that this was the best tonkatsu she’s ever had – but I reckon she might change her mind if I can find a Saboten restaurant to bring her to here haha.
And we were then off to explore Shinjuku. Some pictures leading up to the main attraction of our Day 1 evening visit: the winter illumination light-ups.
Continued in the next post!
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