Mt. Fuji

• Woke up at 7:15, started walking by 7:45. I needed to get to the World Trade Center bus terminal by 9:00 and it was about an hour walk away (I could have done the train, but I figured I'd be sitting on the bus most of the day. Gotta get those steps in somehow!)
• Didn't get too lost - made it at 8:45.
• Check-in was easy. The staff member spoke English and said we would be departing from 'gate' 3 on bus 1 in seat 3A. I had come into this basement room via an escalator, but all around it had numbered glass doors with curbs just outside for the buses to park. There were 3 50-person buses going to Mt. Fuji, all leaving at 9:00.
• My bus had about 25-30 people on it, so my guess is they had over 150 tourists and just distributed them evenly.
• My guide's name was Take (pronounced like "sake" with a t. He said if we forgot his name we could just yell sake and he would respond :) )
• My seat buddy was a British girl who looked to be about my age named Amelia. She's been traveling for 8 months after quitting her job (I didn't pry because it didn't seem appropriate). She said she would be leaving Tokyo tomorrow for Sri Lanka, but wished she had changed her flight to allow more time in Tokyo. After Sri Lanka it's back to Britain because she's run out of money, but she's really lamenting that (I got the sense that she really needed to get away from it all, but I'm not sure what the details are).
• Take spoke to us about several buildings and legends as we left the Tokyo area. It was about a 1 hour drive to our first rest stop and he managed to fill about 45 mins of it.
• Got to a rest stop with a meh souvenir shop and an observatory with an ok view, but Amelia and I were really looking forward to seeing the view from the water.
• Drove to mountain station #4 (we were supposed to go to 5, but snow fell on the road between 4 & 5 so we couldn't pass). Terrible gift shop, but there was an incredible view of the Japanese alps.
• There was also a strip of broken trees that were taken out by an avalanche a few years ago. Instead of rebuilding the part of the station that was destroyed, they have preserved the Avalanche area "as a reminder of the power the mountain commands over us."
• On the way to the station, there was a 'musical road' which had been grooved so the tires made a song as you drive over it. Unfortunately, we couldn't hear much in the bus (especially with the rattley windows), but the YouTube videos of smaller cars doin it sound much better.
• Drove back to hotel at an amusement park we had passed, where we had lunch.
• We were served in the basement, where tables had been set up to accommodate each group of people. It was here that Amelia and I learned we were the only lone travelers, so we sat together with Take.
• We weren't quite sure what everything was, and a couple of the things had pretty unappealing textures (one felt like you were eating a moist cloth), so we left that.
• The souvenir shop was slightly better here, so we got postcards in case the next one was just as underwhelming.
• Clouds were coming in and shrouding the mountain, and Take said they might be in the way when we got to the water part...
• He said he had a group one time that came and said "we've done this tour 5 times and never seen the mountain!" So we were lucky that we had even seen it that morning.
• Drove 1.5 hours to a pier on lake Ashi (with one pit stop on the way where we saw a valley that should have had Mt. Fuji as a backdrop, but it was gone.
• Took a ferry along Lake Ashi to Hakone. We never got to see Mt. Fuji here. Amelia kept saying "I'm so gutted!" I'd never heard that before
• Passed a Shinto shrine whose hate was half-submerged. The legend we heard has a couple versions (one we got from Take, one we got from the recording that played during our ferry ride). It says there was some 9-headed dragon related to the Loch Ness monster (actually, Ashi's name supposedly comes from "Nessy," a nick name for the monster) that was terrorizing the town of Hakone. In one version the terrorizing acts were that he kept eating the children, in the other version he was destroying crops and the people had to offer their children as sacrifices. Some monk was traveling through from Kyoto and took pity, so he decided to defeat the beast. He somehow made a whirlpool to suck the beast in and latched a sunken tree trunk to his ankle. Version 1 says he was left at the bottom and is still there, version 2 says that as soon as he was trapped he magically transformed into a good dragon that still protects the people of Hakone.
• Took a gondola up to the top of Mt. Komagatake
• The gondola station was a very ugly building, but back behind it was a Shinto shrine right on the peak that we were able to go see. It was cold, so we just went to look at that and came right back to take the gondola down. The view got more and more obstructed by the minute
• Take told us that Hakone is the only place to buy these things called 'magic boxes' that are puzzles to open and close. He said they're almost impossible to find in Tokyo, and I'm not sure if it's true or not but the shop owner/maker seemed very humble and so I bought a 10-step box.
• Drive back to Tokyo without stopping. Most of us slept (Amelia said she was trying to figure check in for her flight and check her hostel details for Columbo)
• There were 2 drop off options: Shinjuku or Ginza. Since Shinjuku was on the Yamanote line to get me back, I picked this one. We got there around 6:30, and Amelia stayed on to Ginza so this was goodbye.
• Since the time was close to 7, I went to the Godzilla again to see it from the street.
• It started raining, which wasn't much fun, but at least it was less than the rain in Shanghai (but still more than a drizzle).
• The Godzilla show was different this time, and not that impressive from the street. The audio was easy to hear, but it looked like a lot of people were just confused about what was happening because you couldn't really see the Godzilla unless you were looking for it (they had turned off its lights and only had the red eyeballs on)
• The rain got a little harder, so I went back through Don Quixote and bought a few snacks.
• Found the Tokyo Metropolitan Building, which I had read about having a free observation deck. I went up the North Tower (the only option) to the 45th floor and looked around. Tokyo doesn't really have a centralized skyline...it's lots of scattered buildings. So the views were nice because they were high up, but there wasn't really much to look at. The 3-tier building where a bunch of "Lost in Translation" was filmed was nearby.
• Passed the LOVE Monument on my way, so I got a picture since I hadn't had time to the day before.
• Tried to pass another capsule hotel on my way back to Shinjuku, but it was also a boring building.
• Got back to hotel and picked up another 500 yen voucher.
• Dropped my stuff off in my room then used my 2 vouchers at the food court. I ordered what looked kinda like a bento box but turned out to be bibimbap.
• Went up to room and planned my last day. Basically going to do a counter-clockwise loop around the city