Tokyo Christmas Day

Today we did a shuttlestop tour around Shinjuku, Shibuya and Odaiba and saw Tokyo Tower up close for the first time. We've voluntarily given ourselves a tight budget, meaning every meal we've had so far has been eaten alongside all the dour and over-burdened "salarymen" in train station basements. That sounds worse than it is though - train station vending machine places are cheap and very cheerful, even if by the end of the day my lips felt like I'd swallowed a weeks worth of salt. Every train we took everywhere was busy, at all times of the day. The train at 11.30 tonight was full of people who were just leaving work - or at least work drinks. We popped into a Big Camera electronics shop to eye up all the super flat, high resolution screened (and now solar powered) mobile phones. Surprised at how many iPhones i saw on the trains. I saw less half a dozen foreign faces like my own for the whole day. In the evening we went to see the Christmas/Winter lights in Roppongi and Tokyo Midtown. Christmas may not mean much here, but they certainly know how to put on a light display. Its hard to explain to someone back home what the point of Christmas here is though. There's Christmas music playing everywhere, there's Christmas lights up in a lot of places - and in most cases a lot nicer than back home - but that's about the extent of it. And its a couples thing rather than having any family focus. We went to the observation deck on top of Mori tower which offered a very nice (and very expensive) view of the Tokyo skyline.