Tokyo

Sunday, June 23

As we touched down in Japan, I was struck by how lush it was! I guess it’s one of the positives of coming during the rainy season. On the flight, one of the attendants insisted that we only needed one customs card for our group, however the customs officer didn’t accept the four of us as a family 😦 So we each had to fill out our own.

I withdrew some yen for everyone, and then Amelia led us to our train. We may have taken the wrong express train, but it may have ended up taking just about the same amount of time. It was super interesting seeing the cultural differences between Japan and any other place I’d visited. No one talked on the train besides the four of us, loud smelly Gaijin (foreigners). Also, they use a lot of cute cartoons and animals in advertising, or even warning signs. For example

We surfaced from the metro station decently late, around 8pm or so. It was super nice walking around the quiet streets at night. It’s a huge change from Hong Kong, where we were jostling for space on the sidewalk. Here the sidewalks were wide and clean, and the air felt really nice and cool. In the area we were in, Asakusa (pronounced more like Asaksa, or if you’re Nick, pronounced more like Asa-koosa, with the same cadence as “Mansa Musa”) there are a lot of random cultural elements embedded into the streets. There are the general things like gates and figurines, and super specific things like statues of women in traditional clothing peering down at you from the second floor of buildings.

Also people were biking around like it was a college campus. This is pretty common all throughout Japan! As we neared our hostel, we accidentally knocked on the door of the Thai restaurant next door. A small old lady popped out, and I asked her if this was the hostel. She pointed next door and then let out the most satisfying, genuine, and sandpaper-y cackle I’ve ever heard. I wish I had recorded the experience, but alas, earwax. We checked into our hostel, where the very friendly Miki was asking us about our past and future travels, and giving us tips as she scanned our passports. She was astounded that Forest’s first name was in fact Forest, questioning “Forest? Family name?”. The room itself was nice, the bathroom was equipped with a bidet! I’ll never forget Forest’s shriek of delight as he used the bidet for the first time.

We decided to get some late night grub at an Izakaya somewhere in the area. As we wandered out, we must have passed at least four 7-11 stores. Convenience stores seem to be breeding like rabbits. At the Izakaya, we took off our shoes and sat down at the low tables.

Jasper had sent me a super useful link for vegetarian-related phrases in different languages. I’m too lazy to dig it up now, but it had phrases for “I’m vegetarian”, “I don’t eat meat/fish” and “egg is ok”. I put it to good use, since it seems vegetarian items are, unlike convenience stores, rare in Japan. Our server was a super nice old man who helped us navigate the menu (on a tablet with questionable UI design) to find the vegetarian items. We got tall glasses of Asahi beer, and a TON of random dishes. I think in total we ordered nearly 30 small items. I ate mostly fried things, tofu, and onigiri with sour plum. I got really sick of some of the fried foods since they stuffed em with way too much cheese. I hated the sight of cheese for a few days after that.

I had the distinct pleasure of watching Nick eat most of a mackerel, including its eyeballs.

Afterwards, we got some Strongs from 7-11, which are like gin and tonics in cans and they taste delicious. Perhaps tooooo delicious, I wonder how many ingredients are natural. Walking around the streets of Asakusa was really nice, here’s how we show that we are content:

We stopped by Don Quijote, a megastore that has literally anything you could think of. It had more levels than I was willing to explore. It’s really interesting to see all the random stuff they have, like these sword-handle umbrellas.

Back at the hostel, I distinctly remember making everyone’s bed for them since they just weren’t up to code. We are staying for three nights after all!

Monday, June 24th

I woke up the latest, at around 11. I tried to eat a little bit of the various buns that Nick had brought back for me, but all I felt like having was some nice tea at our hostel. It was raining a decent amount, but it wasn’t too cold. We ducked into a soba place for a late lunch

The server helped me modify my order so that I had a soy sauce dipping sauce instead of something fish based. My dip was a mixture of soy sauce, yam, and raw egg. The method to eating soba seemed to be take a few noodles, dip them in whatever dip you had, then enjoy! I preferred the soba noodles by themselves. Buckwheat has a really nice flavor on its own! They served barley tea with the soba which was also quite nice. Afterwards, we went to a 7-11 where I got some mango products, including this beauty

I think we had the first umbrella casualty at this point: Amelia’s umbrella got stolen outside the 7-11. (Aside: the soba shop actually had a mechanism with which you could lock your umbrella and take the corresponding key! Apparently umbrellas are the only thing that get stolen in Japan) We hopped on a train to Akihabara (after I made us walk in the completely wrong direction), where we struggled to find an exit for a good 10 minutes. We had to actually ask for help after walking into a few dead ends.

As one does in Akihabara, we went to a maid cafe (which Amelia had actually been to before). For the uninitiated: women dress up in French maid outfits and serve you items like coffee and cake (or even alcoholic drinks). They also refer to you as “Master” or “Princess”, to give the effect that they are maids in your estate. It was super awkward throughout but also wildly entertaining. I found everything funny in a curious sort of way. Like the fact that they made us little cards that had our names and said “Level 1 master” (it’s a rewards card), the little flashlight wands they gave us to wave around as they did a song and dance, and the ceremony they had us do to “bless” our food and drinks, all of this was hilarious to me at the time. It’s just so out of the ordinary from anything I’ve ever experienced. I feel like a lot of the clientele were regulars; I think these things are meant for people who are lonely and struggle to make friendships. I could see some customers sitting by themselves chatting with some of the maids.

Our maid asked me what I would like drawn on my mocha, so of course I asked for a tanuki!

We then went into an anime/manga/weeb shop where I spent a lot of time picking out various pins and trinkets for some of my weeb friends (myself included!). They had everything! EXCEPT FOR INUYASHA. I was honestly really sad, I didn’t see a single Inuyasha-related item in Japan.

We weren’t quite sure what to do afterwards, so we went to Ginza, which my parent’s neighbors had recommended. We ran into an expat in the station who was looking for a particular station exit (some stations have >10 exits depending on where you want to surface) for his DJ gig. Walking around outside, we were surrounded by super fancy brands and huge intersections

We went to Tokyu Plaza, which is a HUGE mall that looks pretty ominous from the outside.

There were a lot of fancy shops inside, including Hinka Rinka, which I’m only giving a shoutout to because the name is super fun to say. Hinka Rinka!

Afterwards, we heading to Shinjuku. By the way, Asakusa, Akihabara, Ginza, Shinjuku and so on are all different areas within Tokyo. I heard that Shinjuku had good ramen and interesting bars. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get into a ramen place that served vegetarian food, so we went to Coco curry, which is a chain. Honestly it hit the spot, was the first meal with vegetables I’d enjoyed for a while.

I specifically remember enjoying walking through this alleyway:

which led us to this little temple:

Afterwards, we headed over to the Gai bar district, which has a bunch of cramped bars in alleyways, perfect for luring in gaijin.

We went into one of the bars upstairs, had whiskey at the tiny bar, and chatted with the bartender. It was a nice, calm experience, much needed after a hectic day. We called it a night and headed back to our cozy hostel.

Tuesday, June 25th

I finally had an appetite in the morning, but Forest accidentally knocked the bun out of my hand 😦

We headed over to the Imperial Palace (Edo Castle) by 9am to get one of the walk-in registration forms. They only allow a limited number of visitors per day, so it was important to get there early! We walked over to a little cafe and scarfed down onigiri before the tour started at 10.

Theres an interesting juxtaposition of medieval and modern architecture when you are standing on the palace grounds, since the backdrop is the modern Tokyo skyline.

The castle grounds were a bit simple but still super aesthetic. They also had a free guided tour, which was nice! Well, you aren’t allowed to go anywhere without a tour guide for security reasons. But also, the tour seemed a bit underwhelming, it’s certainly not a “must do” attraction.

Afterwards, we went over to a museum, but we weren’t allowed to take pictures, sit, drink water, etc so we just left. There were gardens nearby that were nice enough. There were lots of dragonflies, and even a small rice paddy that apparently the Emperor picks from every now and then for some ceremonies.

For lunch, we found ourselves once again at Ginza, Tokyu Plaza. We went to an udon place, where once again the server had to help me quite a bit to find something I could eat. They were really sincere, asking me if seaweed and egg was fine. Throughout Japan, I never felt that people were aghast at my vegetarianism, they always tried to help!

The pictures in the menu made the food portions look really small. The server said that they offer single, double, or triple portions of udon at the same price. So Nick, Forest, and I thought, what the heck, let’s do the triple portion. It doesn’t look all that large.

We were wrong.

Needless to say, I barely ate half of my portion. Nick, on the other hand, was just fine.

Amelia headed off for her hair appointment, and Nick, Forest and I went to a coffee shop for coffee and cakes. It was interesting to see a smoking section inside a coffee shop.

Afterwards, I dragged Nick and Forest to Shinjuku Gyeonmae, a huge garden in Shinjuku.

This is where the movie Garden of Words is set, so I wanted to see if I could recognize some of the major areas used in the animation.

Nick and Forest needed a bathroom break so I peeled off and explored the greenhouse on my own. It was so impressive, it even had a waterfall inside! And there were so many vibrant flowers everywhere. I bet my mom would have loved to see it.

There was also a huge open grassy space in the gardens. Would really love to go back for a picnic! Maybe I’ll hit up Yogi bear.

Then, we went to a pizza restaurant ran by a pizza MASTER. Unfortunately, it was closed, so we made a reservation at the other restaurant owned by the same dude. In the meantime, we saw Tokyo tower.

There’s a mall inside, and you can go all the way to the top, but we didn’t feel like it.

There was a woman taking a selfie of herself with the tower, so Nick offered to take a picture of her with the tower. As he took her photo, he tried making smalltalk, but asked “Are you traveling alone?”. Of course we subsequently roasted him as soon as she was out of earshot for asking a potentially creepy question (of course he didn’t mean anything by it). Anyways, I was teasing him a bit later, and grabbed him from behind and asked “ArE yoU trAVelINg AlONE?” and everyone was dead silent. Of course, that very same girl was right next to us. I’m not sure if she heard/understood or not, but ohhhh man what a tense/hilarious moment.

We arrived at the other pizza place and had honestly some of the BEST pizza I can remember. The dough was perfectly salty, the Buffalo mozzarella was insanely tasty, no complaints! We really just gobbled it up. I wish I remembered the name, I’m sure Nick knows.

Afterwards, we meandered back to our hostel. We stopped at Sensoji temple at night, since it’s super well illuminated. The grounds felt really magical at night!

On our way back, Forest and Nick gobbled up some eel, and then we went to a bar with these two really cute dogs. The bar felt more like someone’s home, since we were sitting on a couch. I had a pint of a lager, it was so refreshing after a long day. Back at the hostel, we played some cards and started our laundry upstairs. It took a while to run the washer and dryers, so we ended staying up pretty late and playing a lot more big 2 than we had bargained for.

Wednesday, June 26th

We checked out but left our bags at the hostel for a bit. We wandered over to a knife market, but the market didn’t exist. Maybe we came at the wrong time. So instead we went to a 7-11, had some grub, then went to a fish market. It was insane. Immediately, some giant shrimp flopped around and splashed me with water. Not ideal.

We got some matcha ice cream there, and Nick and Forest (but mostly Nick) went gaga for these insanely tasty fruits like cantaloupe and grapes. Each grape was maybe a dollar, but absolutely massive and tasted like a dessert wine.

We walked past a really nice temple on our way to lunch, the exterior was quite different from the other temples we’ve seen in Japan

Inside, there was a place where you could stamp a piece of paper with one of those nice, ornate stamps. Earlier in the trip, we’ve been making a lot of “How can she slap?” references, so when Amelia was stamping away, I said quietly (or so I thought), “How can she stamp?”, and a woman turned around and genuinely said “Oh, it’s free!”. Another joke misfired.

For lunch, we went to, wait for it….. Ginza, Tokyu Plaza! This time we went for conveyor belt sushi. We were pretty braindead at this point, so to pass time we played “Animal, place, person, thing” in line. Basically you just name an animal, then place, person, and thing that starts with a particular letter. My family used to play it a lot during road trips, since its so easy even the driver can play without getting too distracted. I didn’t find all that much to eat at the sushi place, but Nick and Forest were stacking plates high.

We got our bags from the hostel, and went to the train station to head over to our next stop, Hakone.

We were super confused when buying tickets, it seemed that we were almost double purchasing tickets since the teller gave us each two tickets, one for Akihabara to Odawara, and one for Tokyo station to Odawara. We thought we would have Akihabara to Tokyo, then Tokyo to Odawara? Anywho, the bullet train express was just as expensive as predicted. As we were waiting for the train, we almost missed it entirely since it was sitting at the platform early, so we mistook it for the previous train. Onward to Odawara (the station closest to Hakone)!