Travelogue : A week in Tokyo - 1

Life is often surprising, but sometimes it scoops us completely off our feet. Throughout a series of posts, I will explain to you my experience in Japan, and particularly Tokyo and its suburbs and hopefully this will make you want to visit this incredible country.

First of all, contrarily to an old belief, travelling to Japan isn’t exclusively for the wealthiest. For some time now, big airline companies have started to develop their flights between major European airports usually with a layover in Shanghai. To be honest with you, I prepared my trip five days before going, and it cost me quite the same than going to a major European capital for example. And this is counting the flight, housing, transports ect. I booked all of this by myself without a travel agency or some last minute website. I don’t really want to enter in details in the post, but please feel free to contact me in the comment section for any information regarding a future trip of yours, I’ll be more than glad to help.

For this first post, I wanted to show you the very famous Shibuya crossroad and its train station (currently under construction). I took this picture from one of the observatory in Shibuya’s town hall. This viewpoint is free, accessible, has incredibly fast elevators and there was no queue whatsoever. So one can easily say it is a great spot to observe the frenzy of this surrealist crossroad. If you think that I am making an overstatement about this place, let’s take a look at the numbers :

• The traffic lights have a 2 min cycle
• There are 10 traffic lanes
• At peak hours, more than 2 500 people use this crossroad in only one traffic light cycle
• 250 000 people cross it every day.

Those numbers are absolutely crazy, yet everything happens calmly, in a very fluid motion and without any rush or hustle. Tokyo’s inhabitants are very courteous, patients and pay attention to their surrounding, which makes this huge city so nice and enjoyable, even in the midst of the throng.

Nikon D750 - Natural light - With post-processing