Apartment

As some of you may know we hired a serviced apartment in Tokyo (Roppongi Hills) for two weeks as it had some of the comforts of a home like a kitchen, a laundry and also being in the same place for two weeks is alot more relaxing than shifting hotels all the time. After some research we found it was actually cheaper to stay at a serviced apartment than at a hotel, we paid under $2000 AUD for this room for two weeks and a hotel in tokyo of this size would be well over 200$ per night and without the extra comforts of the kitchen and laundry.

The apartment is on the 10th floor (top) of the Court Annex building owned by Asahi Homes, yes the same Asahi that makes the AWESOME Asahi Super Dry beer, softdrinks, newspapers and the other 400 other products. It is across the road from Roppongi Hills, a 4 billion dollar complex built to allow people to work, live and be entertained in the same area saving travelling times and improving the quality of life.

My opinion, its another office building with the normal amount of restaurants, cinema's, shops surrounding it. The only difference is there are a couple of luxury apartment skyscrapers built near the main tower. If you have a extremely high up in the ladder job and can afford one of these apartments then yes, it is what they had planned for, but for the normal joe who works in Toyko and has to commute and hour or more to get here then no. To back this up. The only shops in the complex are Tiffany, Versace, Louis Vitton, Kate Space, Escada, MaraMax, Christian Lacroix, Hugo Boss and all these other ones ive never heard. the other main building in the complex is Asahi TV, yep, they do TV too and have 3 or more channels here in tokyo and this year they are 50years old!

Enough of that, our apartment is an ok size, its a 35sqm studio apartment so the living room and bedroom are essentially in the same room with a 1m high wall divider between them. An extremely small kitchen which has no bench space at all, a normal size fridge, oven, microwave etc. Behind that is our laundry which is a refrigerator size recess with a washer and dryer to do our laundry and also our bathroom which is a normal size fibreglass hotel which you will find in all hotels in Japan.

It came with an 80cm LCD tv, DVD, VCR (which i cant friggin figure out how to do the simplest thing and thats record. even after pressing the record button and every other combination. grrrr, piece of crap) and thank fark, cable tv. We have about 50 channels which are japanese but thankfully there are 10 english/bilingual channels, 5 movie and tv show channels and 5 documentary channels like discovery, NG and history so we can get home after a day of walking around everywhere and viewing the sites and just sit down and relax watching TV in English.

Roppongi is apparently the nightlife part of Tokyo and after walking the main streets of the area you can see why. There are a ton of clubs in the area compared to the other main area's of Tokyo and im talking a club every 20-30m surrounded by restaurants.

All in all, its a good little apartment right in the middle of Tokyo.

Some more pictures of our apartment and the area around.

Shaun