Wandering around Shinjuku

The area around our capsule hotel was interesting. We noticed a lot of Korean restaurants, a lot of young people walking around, shopping or standing in line for street food or for a table in small restaurants. We did not feel like eating Korean food, so Laurel googled some local restaurants with good reviews. I wanted to see the Godzilla building, so we just meandered towards that area. And then, we saw it!

We found a well known ramen restuarant chain, Ichiran Ramen, for dinner. It was a very small place in the basement of a building, about 14 seats total. We ordered from the kiosk using the English menu, paid, and stood in line. We were given a paper form to mark how we want soup and the texture of our ramen, then waited for about 10 mins until two individual booths were available. At our personal booth, we gave our paper tickets and form to the server who then closed the bamboo flap in front of us after giving us a glass for water from the faucet at the left of the booth and our utensils. It did not take too long for our bowls of ramen to show up at our respective booths. Our experience at this ramen restaurant was almost exactly as seen in this video!

After finishing our ramen, Laurel decided she wanted more noodles, while I wanted a matcha flan for dessert; so we pulled out the additional order sheet in our booth. We individually placed our order along with the correct cash on a little plate, rang the bell at our booth to get the attention of the servers behind the bamboo flap. A very interesting experience, and the food was very good too.

After dinner we checked out Shinjuku's Golden Gai, a bar district that was not as lively as described. Maybe it was too early in the evening. There were a lot of bars but not places we would like to spend time in. Note the name of the bar in the 2nd photo!

We decided to split up since Laurel wanted to do some shopping on her own. I wandered around some more, window shopping and found myself in the Omoide Yokocho district with its very narrow street of bars and restaurants. This was much more lively than Golden Gai; in fact, it was insanely crowded, and smoky from the open grills right next to the street. I went in a few feet and decided I had enough.

On the way back, I found a large suitcase at a good price, bought it and brought it back to the hotel. Relaxed on the 8th floor lounge; later on, went back out for snacks and drinks at the 7-Eleven next door. Took our showers on the 7th floor: Laurel felt the shower area was not very clean, but I could not tell due to the poor lighting. Back in the capsule, the bed was not too bad, there was a USB port near the top and a knob to control the overhead light. I slept pretty well until the neighboring pods' alarms woke me up. It was quite an experience to stay in a capsule hotel, right in the middle of the busy Shinjuku area. Our pods cost 7,748 yen (USD 51.30) per person, so it was not cheap compared to a shared room in a standard hotel. Perhaps there are better capsule hotels, although this was the one with the least negative reviews. I am not likely to be staying in another capsule hotel in the future. Our experience with the cheaper Pocket Hotel in Kyoto, a high end hostel, was many times more positive.