Where Are Your Ninjas?: Day 1 - Part 3: Welcome to Tokyo

"English is good! We have English, the boy speaks it!"

This was yelled at us from inside a restaurant we were looking at because it had an English menu sitting on top of a cooler just outside the door. I don't know about you, but when someone yells at me from the doorway of a restaurant next to a subway station and that restaurant has a cooler outside it you can smoke next to, I go in. But more on this in a minute.

The bus ride, pardon me, Airport Limousine ride, from Narita to our hotel in Shiodome took about an hour, most of which was spent trying desperately not to fall asleep. The automated announcements on the bus were done once it Japanese, then once in English. This was the announcement in regard to cellphone use :

"Please refrain from using your cell phone, as the conversation will annoy the neighbors."

I demand that be the language used for automated announcements on American public transit. Demand. I almost started applauding when I heard this, but I didn't want to scare the Swedish family in front of us. They looked overwhelmed enough as it was.

Staying awake was a struggle, but once we arrived, we perked right up. Here's why:

This is the lobby of our hotel, The Park Hotel Tokyo, and it is the nicest lobby of any place I've ever stayed. It's gorgeous.

The hotel itself starts on the 25th floor of the Shiodome Media Tower. It's structured as a giant, triangular-shaped atrium, with all rooms on all floors surrounding the lobby itself. Every floor has a picture window outside the elevator bank that gives you a view of the entire hotel. Every view of Tokyo outside is postcard-worthy. They knew what they were doing when they put this place together.

It's also one of the quietest buildings I've ever been in. And not quiet in the "Hey, When Do We Get Murdered?" sort of way. Quiet in a serene, comforting way. The staff is extremely nice. All of my luggage was moved into the room by a woman who weighed approximately as much as my largest suitcase and she would NOT let me help. At all. Good people at the Park Hotel Tokyo.

After checking in and dropping off our bags, we walked through Shiodome to Ginza, pictured above. We were looking for food and an English menu, since neither of us had the mental capacity to handle the smiling, nodding and pointing of ordering from a Japanese menu with pictures. The first place that offered an English menu was closed and every place else was crowded. We were about to give up and order room service when we walked by the restaurants next to the Ginza metro station.

That's when we met our friends with the cooler.

"English is good! We have English, the boy speaks it!

They were insistent and we were exhausted, so we sat down with zero idea of what kind of food the place served. For all I knew, we had just walked into a place that makes you fight and kill what you order. We were too tired to argue.

This was directly behind us. A wall full of sake. Good start. Good start. Then the worker who spoke English walked over, took one look at us said, with no hesitation, "Beer." Not a question, a statement. "Beer. You're both drinking beer."

We agreed. Immediately. Because that man was a genius.

This is the beef set. That's what it said on the menu, with a small picture of a cow drawn in crayon next to it. It is a plate of uncooked meat that you grill yourself, then put on rice, so I was pretty close with the fight-and-kill suspicion. In hindsight this sounds like a recipe for a trip to the hospital, but at this point he could have put a bag of garbage in front of me and I would have eaten it to be polite. By some miracle it was delicious. The Sapporo helped. Forty-five minutes and a frantic search for an ATM that spoke English later, we were on our way back to the hotel.

Here's Carisa at a shrine in Shiodome Media Center outside of hotel. As soon as we find out what it means, I'll let you know.