Day 15 5/27/18 Looking way way up and way way down

Day 15 - Sunday, Skyscrapers in Shinjuku, Sunset in Roppongi 

We confess, a travel weariness is setting in - we know we still have so much to see but the pressures of choosing which new places we should see, new route finding, new restaurants to find serving food that isn't Italian (apparently 10,000 Italian restaurants in Tokyo), Starbucks, McDonalds, Dennys or a Shake Shack, but whose menus we can try to comprehend and isn't just fish fish fish is starting to wear.  

We took to the subway shortly before noon and headed out to the western central city, exiting at Shinjuku station, which has surpassed Tokyo station for the number of trains and commuters that pass through on a given day - 3 million in a city of 13 million (36 million if you include the entire metropolitan area).  After 5 escalators swept us up to ground level - one being a dizzying 3 stories, we exited street-side and after grabbing some quick noodles for lunch (no English menu) we finally got our bearing and headed towards the new government complex.  Along the way, we saw the Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower - so named for its shape and the fact that it houses in its 50 floors several universities.  It was a beautiful structure and we wandered around the basement floors but access to the building was limited to University students.

Cocoon Tower

Sompo Japan Building

Panorama from the central plaza of the government building complex, the scale of which is hard to describe

Here's a view (not ours) of one of the clear days of the skyscrapers in this district with Mt. Fuji in the background (we didn't see Mt Fuji once in the five days in Tokyo but did on the flight into the airport several weeks earlier).

Skyscrapers of Tokyo with Mt. Fuji (which we never saw) in the background. Photo By Morio - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5794297

Godzilla at home in Tokyo

Don't get too excited, they are all androids

One last stop for us on the Shinjuku Line was the neighborhood adjacent to the train station, which is characterized as the entertainment district and famous for its bawdy character.  It boasted an eclectic mix of brand new hotels, somewhat seedy shops, lots of music stores and a parade of Japanese women in short "maid" costumes.  This is the home of such famous Tokyo landmarks as the Godzilla Head and the Robot Restaurant and , both of which we admired from afar as did we the Japanese "maids" who were indeed parading up and down the street and ignoring us.  It was the most crowded neighborhood of Tokyo (Japan) we had seen and the average age seemed to be about 30 of the throngs of people.  Side streets were not open to traffic on this glorious Sunday afternoon, so strolling and people watching seemed just the right thing to do.
We did - for the first time - see some homeless people and were sad to have confirmed the ubiquity of poverty and people who seem to fall through the cracks of society.  


We then headed over to Roppongi to travel up to the 52nd floor and the Sky Observatory

 Dinner at - you guessed it, a sushi restaurant with a spicy tuna roll along with individual sushi platter (tuna, tuna, salmon, mackerel) for Rich.