Today was a quieter day, one of my in-between days sandwiching major events on my trip. According to my Google Fit app, Monday (Day 10) was my furthest walking day of my trip so far, clocking in at 29,043 steps, whereas today (Day 11) was my shortest, clocking in at 12,176 steps. I spent time putting my feet up in my hotel room, processing that Halloween video in the previous blog post, doing  a bunch of work (since this is supposed to be a work vacation too), finalizing plans for an event on Nov 03, and watching random TV shows in the background, both before and after my excursion for the day.

It was nearly 2:00 pm by the time I finally stepped out of my room to start my day, but my first two pictures are actually from the morning when I wandered down to the front desk to inquire about (and then decided to skip) breakfast. This is the hallway outside my hotel room, between the elevator and the room. Isn’t it ugly? And a little disorienting. What genius made this?

Eyesores aside, my first actual pictures are from Shinjuku-Sanchome Station. This was a few stops away from Akasaka-Mitsuke Station, along the Marunouchi Line, which I’ve taken several times now. I had never taken it along this part of the line though, which contained my Akasaka Station, then two Yotsuya ones (Yotsuya Station and Yotsuya-Sanchome Station), and then four Shinjuku ones (Shinjuku-Gyoemmae Station, Shinjuku-Sanchome Station, Shinjuku Station, and Nishi-Shinjuku Station) in a row. Nishi- here means western, -Sanchome means 3rd Street (or city block/district, but its closer to street in terms of western notation), and -Gyoemmae just means that it’s in front of the “Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden”.

I say all that to help visualize how close the stations were to each other (or alternatively, how big those particular neighbourhoods are) — I could have walked to Shinjuku-Sanchome Station within an hour, and the second part of my excursion later on was to Sophia University, which was right by Yotsuya Station, in between Shinjuku and Akasaka where my hotel is. Anyway, here’s a picture of Shinjuku-Sanchome Station:

I left the station through an Isetan gate, a posh department store I knew from my childhood in Singapore. I hadn’t visited one on my grand return to Singapore earlier this year though. But we practically share the same last name, right? And corporations are persons, right? Hello, cousin!

Heading outside, I walked around the district a bit, looking around and even entering a couple of department stores in the hopes of finding some things on my sister’s shopping list. To no avail, again. They build their stalls here though — several of the stores I entered were over 10 stories tall, largely owned by one company (sometimes it was a mix), and often had restaurants on the top few floors and then a variety of goods on the lower floors. Some, but not all, of the restaurants seemed really pricey. There were also regular eateries in little buildings here and there, unaffiliated with the taller megacorps, though.