Day 1 - Nishi-shinjuku Hotel (Shinjuku)

31st Jan, 2003 - We stayed at Nishi-Shinjuku Hotel (http://www.nshotel.com/english/index.html), it's about 10 min walk from Shinjuku Station (in fact it would most probably take you longer to find the right exit out of the station). It's a business hotel, so don't expect any fantastic rooms (it's bigger than a cupboard, but not by much). It's clean and comfortable - and they were very generous about looking after our suitcases whilst we went on overnight trips around Tokyo. Can't recall the price, but very competitive for the location which is very central.

There was definitely some strange aspects of the location however... such as being located next to the cemetary (my first experience of this... and no - Japanese are not buried vertically, as i've heard somewhere... they are almost exclusively cremated).

Also - when we were there in 2003, there was a box-city out the front in an open square, i.e. where all the homeless had set-up. We had no problems here however, and was a stark reminder just how hard it can be (remember it was winter, and temperatures were regularly 5 degC during the day.