Monday, July 1st

The first thing we did out of the station was go to another Coco curry and have lunch, after which we dropped off our bags in the airbnb, which was next to the station as well. We walked around the Shinseka area (lots of Shinshinkai jokes with Nick), which had a lot of interesting restaurants and even a few arcades!

There was a restaurant advertising “sumo sized” portions

We went to Don Quixote to pick up random stuff; I got some magnets to give out to family, and paper crane earrings!

Below the store were rows and rows of people on slot machines. It was kinda scary, felt like some sort of bizarre farm. Back on the main street, we found a game place where we played ping pong and darts!

We realized that our airbnb had a washer but no dryer, so we went back to Don Quijote (by this time, their little jingle was stuck in my head for the rest of the trip) to get clothespins. After we did some much needed laundry, we went to an Okonomiyaki place for dinner. It seemed very much like a local favorite, with one lady doing everything from taking orders, cooking, etc. Okonomiyaki is a Japanese savory pancake with lots of cabbage! I got mine with just egg batter, cabbage, green onion, nori and sauce (had to custom order since otherwise nothing vegetarian!). It was really interesting eating it hot from the grill at our table!

Afterwards, we went to a sushi place!

We noticed they had a “buy 2 get 1 free” deal on beer (per person, not split across the table). As we were on our second beer, the owner (?) came over and asked if we wanted the free round, and when we nodded he cackled and knowingly patted me on the back. Fun guy!

I noticed as we were leaving, I actually recognized a song on the radio! It was Anri “Can’t stop the loneliness”.

Afterwards, we went to a music bar at chatted with a couple Canadian students at the crowded bar. The Bartender said he was working on a city pop album! So we talked about Mariya Takeuchi, Tatsuo Yamashita, and Anri briefly.

Tuesday, July 2nd

We went to Dotonbori for a late breakfast (early lunch?), which is a popular shopping area in Osaka. It was super busy even in the morning! Unfortunately for me, I had to eat a combination of convenience store food and Taco Bell of all things in order to get vegetarian food.

Afterwards, Nick peeled off to look for small-lens sunglasses (he saw a monk with Tokyo with them and was obsessed ever since) and the rest of us went to Happy Pancake and were very happy with the pancakes indeed.

Each order came with three pancakes, so naturally we shared each order! We decided to go to Nara, but Nick wasn’t available so we went on without him. It was about an hour long train to Nara, and a bit confusing as to which train we were meant to take. The signs would be displayed in Japanese for 90% of the time, then quickly switch to English, but not long enough that we could actually read them fully.

Nara lived up to its reputation, it really is full of deer! They mob the sidewalks since there are vendors who sell specially made snacks to tourists. We didn’t feed any cause it looked hectic and scary tbh.

Afterwards, we got a bit lost trying to find Todaji temple, which, made originally in the 7th century (but rebuilt after fires and such), houses a HUGE buddha.

I think the exterior of Buddha is supposed to be entirely metallic. We gave a little donation so we could light small candles in the temple.

Then we went to a museum with a lot of awesome artifacts found around the temple grounds, such as scabbards and really impressive sculptures. One larger-than life sculpture was of a 40-armed deity!

Afterwards, we went back to Osaka and met up with Nick. For dinner, the others went to an Omakase, which we knew has no vegetarian options. I opted to go to a cute little vegetarian cafe that seemed to be home converted to a restaurant. I had stir fried udon!

I decided to explore a nearby music store, and look who I ran into on the way there!

I was interested to see if the music store had wooden flutes, but they didn’t really have non-western instruments. They did have a lot of ocarinas though!

Afterwards, we met up in Dotonbori, which is really fun at night!

We went to a Round One (huge arcade chain), and what an experience that was. At first we noticed godlike people playing rhythm games. They even brought their own equipment like gloves! Some were playing in their formal work clothing, others were dressed specifically for a workout.

We mere mortals played a few games of DDR, thankfully without anyone else around. I had never really played but I was surprisingly the best among us four. It was really fun but definitely works up a sweat.

There was also Mario Kart!

We went a few floors up and played some more darts. Again, dumb luck helped me win one of the games of 301 (but horrible lost the rest of the games).

Wednesday, July 3rd

I finished reading Red Dwarf this morning. What a treat it was! I’d recommend it to anyone remotely interested in science-fiction and looking for some good laughs.

We started our day with a visit to Osaka castle, which was amazingly tall and beautiful! Definitely more impressive on the outside than the Edo Palace/Imperial Palace in Tokyo.

We went up the 8-or-so floors, each of which has a small exhibit to explore. A lot of the exhibits were centered around this one huge tapestry that depicted a famous battle for Osaka (The Summer battle?). The art depicts a lot of civilian casualties and misfortune.

The view from the very top was splendid as well!

We split off for lunch near the Osaka Aquarium, and unfortunately I had no cash so the only card-accepting place I found was a 7-11. I had a sad lunch indeed. I met up with Amelia and Forest and a Tomkatsu place, but somehow I got there even before they received their food! So I got to watch people eat after having a sad lunch myself, hooray.

The aquarium was spectacular! The fun started just outside:

It was quite packed, but for good reason. The first set of exhibits were a mixture of land and water, e.g. some fish in the water and a cute animal on land. They had a cute capybara napping, and even seals and dolphins swimming around (in different tanks). Here are some random animals we met

There was one HUGE tank with super large fish like whale sharks. There were lots of viewing points all around the tank on different levels. Nick kept overhearing tourists saying in Chinese how tasty the fish looked, and how many people they would need to eat some of the larger ones. Kinda weird to say that in an aquarium!

Forest and Nick kept calling the sunfish “half-fish” (looks like half of it is missing), poor little guy

There were some reaaaaally plump seals!

This ellipsoid was sitting there eating ice and barking away:

Near the exit, they had a little are where we could pet small sharks and rays! I’d highly recommend the aquarium, it was overall a lot of fun.

We went to Dotonbori in the evening, heading back to Round One. Forest challenged me to some one on one DDR, and we kept doing harder and harder songs until we both completely failed (the game cut us off and gave su the E rating). Near us, there was a dude doing a super hard level (where you control two sets of 4 buttons by yourself) in a nice work outfit, with his friend behind him fanning him and shouting encouragement. GOALS right there. Afterwards, we got some ramen. Interestingly you pay at the vending machine outside to get a ticket, then go inside and present your ticket.

We then went to a video game bar so Forest and I could get our fix of smash and mario kart, but they only had an N64 so it was certainly an interesting experience. It’s been a long time since I’ve played the first smash game. We followed it up with a visit to a darts bar, where I had no lucky break this time around. We called it a night and started packing for our flight out to Bangkok tomorrow morning!

Friday, June 20th

The train ride from Odawara to Kyoto was green and peaceful, so naturally I napped. There was this cute kid with rolls of chub stomping up and down the aisles near the end; always a nice touch.

We had to transfer a few times within the Kyoto train stations. Usually we use this thing called an IC card to get around, but for the bullet train we had a paper ticket. We just kept inserting the paper ticket in each station until the ticket finally got swallowed. I’m not sure if we cheated Kyoto out of a few yen or what.

The airbnb was spacious enough except in height! I had to bow my head as I walked around, else risk banging into a door frame or a lamp. The door frames were at my eye level!

We were surprisingly tired so we just relaxed near our airbnb. We went to a supermarket and kept bothering the one employee that responded in English since we all had random items we needed to buy (especially Amelia’s color safe shampoo!)

I dragged everyone to an Indian-Nepalese restaurant, expecting a feast of a meal. When I looked at the “set meal” options, none were vegetarian so I asked if I could modify one of them. The waiter was like “yeah chicken tikka” as if it’s vegetarian…. So I gave up and had naan and chole

At least they were playing a lot of songs I recognized! The first song was “say shava shava”, a timeless classic.

Afterwards, we squeezed into a yakitori and had some skewers, edamame, and drinks. There were also sweet potato fries with straight up butter, I didn’t care much for them. But the green onion and mushroom skewers were really tasty!

Nick, Forest and I were sharing a bowl of edamame and we jokingly insisted that each piece we ate was worth 2 or 3 yen depending on the size, so we better keep track, etc.

You probably guessed that we played cards before bed!

Saturday, June 29th

We woke up around 4 am to head over to Fushimi Inari Shrine around sunrise. It was so beautiful, and surprisingly hot. This shrine is known for having supposedly 10,00 gates! Needless to say, we didn’t try to count.

There were very few people, which is what we were going for. There were lots of fox statues though, some of them cutely dressed up!

On the way up, there were lots of mini-shrines with fox statues and miniature gates

Unfortunately, there were lots of mosquitoes and other large insects (moths, spiders) that kept popping up, but FUNfortunately, there were also lots of cats!

There was even a cat that was hunting a snake. I think the snake got away by playing dead (we almost thought it was just some poop coiled up, not a snake!)

Fushimi Inari Shrine was definitely my favorite spot in Kyoto, it’s a MUST!

We took a much needed shower at the airbnb, and then went off for an early lunch in Arashiyama. Nick wanted to go to this beef restaurant to eat Phantom beef (only 80 such beef cows at a time?), so we had to get to the restaurant early to put his name down. I of course was not interested in eating there, but I was interested in this little guy:

Before lunch (the restaurant would only open around 11), we decided to go to the bamboo forest. Before that, we got some soy milk/matcha mix softserve, which was really tasty and had some mochi samples! Kyoto is apparently famous for its mochi. We walked along a riverfront and circled into the bamboo forest.

The place was full of tourists, so we blitzed through

While the others enjoyed a beef-centric lunch,

I went to a nearby vegetarian restaurant for shojin ryori (traditional vegetarian monk food). I had a killer view from my seat!

And the food was really nicely presented as well, even if I barely knew what anything was or how to eat it.

Almost every item had some soy in it, which got a bit repetitive. And there were definitely some items that I thought were desserts (like the little green bowl on the right) that were anything but desserts, unless you consider wasabi sweet.

After meeting up with the others, we went to the Golden Pavilion (Kinkakuji). I distinctly remember that when a stream of people would disembark from the bus, the driver would say “arigato gozaimashita, gozaimashita, gozaimashita, …, gozaimashita ” tacking on a gozaimashita in the same exact tone for each passenger as they tagged off. It was almost mesmerizing. Forest and Amelia had already seen it so Nick and I went in by ourselves.

I think there’s one of Buddha’s relics inside, but I’m not sure. The gold-leaf exterior certainly is remarkable!

There wasn’t much to do here except look at the thing (you can’t enter). I can see why Forest and Amelia wouldn’t visit a second time.

We met up with the others and took a taxi to Kamigamo shrine. I had heard that the two “gamo” shrines (on the same river), Kamigamo and Shimigamo, are must sees. However Kamigamo was a bit of a let down compared to what we had already seen earlier that day.

We tried to catch a bus home, but we honestly couldn’t find the bus stand. Google maps let us down, leading us to phantom stops all over the place. We bought some snacks at a convenience store (well, can you consider a bag of carrots as a snack [unless your name is Cale Horeff]?) and just got a taxi home. We had an early start to the day, so we all napped until evening.

I started reading Red Dwarf, which my dad recommended for me, and it’s so funny in a dry way. As I laughed and laughed I could imagine my dad laughing at the same stupid jokes. Around 8 we ventured out to the Gion district, where there’s a lot of shopping and food.

We went to Ramen Ippudo, which was definitely better than what I’ve had in the US! There was a bit of a wait but the vegan ramen + kaedama (noodle refill) really hit the spot. Nick was overjoyed to finally see me really dig into a meal.

As it rained down on our walk back from a station, I ran into Kimberly, one of my neighbors on the street I grew up on! Like me, she was with 3 other friends on a post-graduation trip. Such a small world!

Sunday, June 30th

We woke up to some really torrential rain. Overall our luck with weather has been really good considering we came to Japan during monsoon season.

We walked over to a vegan cafe where we all had pretty much the same dish: miso soup, salad, and tofu over rice. Nick’s umbrella was stolen, which means that I’m the only one whose umbrella didn’t get jacked (I think Forest’s was stolen in Tokyo or something).

At the station, Nick realized he didn’t have his IC card, so he had to walk back home to get his card. But then he realized I didn’t give him the key either! So I had to run to throw the key to him across the turnstile, and barely ran back to the platform in time to catch the train. The three of us remaining headed over to Nishiki market, which is again in the Gion district.

There was a donut shop, Koe donuts, that lured us in with it’s cute decor and tasty looking pastries.

Nishiki market is basically an alleyway lined with shops with all kind of stuff!

I got some fans and random trinkets to give as gifts to family. After Nick caught up, we went into a mall where I got some origami stuff for my cousin Prajwal, and Nick and Forest once again went on a fruit rampage.

Nick headed back home, melon in hand, and the rest of us went over to Kiyomizu-dera temple. The actual temple was under construction, so we didn’t go inside, but the walk up to it was awesome!

We meandered on back home to meet Nick for dinner. We had trouble actually getting into a restaurant we wanted to eat at, Nick and I suspect it’s because they didn’t want foreigners (which isn’t unheard of). We ended up going to a Chinese restaurant, which had a special vegetarian menu with 2 items on it. We went home and had an early night, we would head off to Osaka early tomorrow morning!

Wednesday, June 26th

From Odawara station, we needed to take a bus to get to Hakone. Amelia noted that the Katakana for “bus” was literally “basu”, (it’s supposed to emulate English pronunciation). The thought of that made me chuckle on and off for days.

The bus ride over was really beautiful, up a gently curving mountainside and alongside a river at times

We stayed at Mount View Hakone (seems we can’t get far from Mountain View, eh?) in which we reserved a traditional Japanese room. We sat on cushions on the floor and had a tea table that was whisked away in the evening to make room for Japanese mattresses (no bedframe, just the bed!). While we were at the hotel, we got to wear Yukatas, which felt really nice to wear!

We all visited the onsens before dinner, which are traditional baths. You strip down, sit down on a stool and shower (no standing allowed), then hop into a hot bath. One of the baths (the outside one) had some sulfuric salts in it for whatever reason (medicinal? hygienic?). Of course Nick, Forest and I were a bit awkward about it at first but we enjoyed soaking in the hot waters. Honestly, the water is arguably too warm for my tastes, we couldn’t stay in for too long.

Dinner was a blessing that night. We reserved dinner at the hotel, and they pulled out all the stops. I’ve never seen so many vegetables served all at once.

Inside some of the closed containers were steaming/roasted vegetables. I think it took me over an hour to eat all the food. I think my stomach/appetite had shrunk from the past week of not eating well, so I took my time and enjoyed myself. We went back to our room and played cards for a couple hours, and slept early that night.

Thursday, June 27th

It was a rainy day in Hakone, which is a shame since the main reason we came here was to see Mount Fuji. This unfortunately wasn’t possible this time around due to the weather. After another convenience store breakfast, we took a bus over to Lake Ashi (Lake Ashinoko), where we decided to take the boat cruise across the lake despite the fog. There wasn’t really anything else to do, so we might as well go!

The lake was very foggy, as expected. But it was still beautiful!

We disembarked at Hakonemachiko and ducked into a coffee shop to escape the rain. We played some codenames on our phone as we waiting for delicious Japanese matcha pancake!

After a short bus ride to Motohakoneko, we walked in the wind and rain over to Hakone shrine.

We all drank from the traditional fountains, where you use the ladles of water to first clean your hands, then drink from your hands. Let’s just say some of us were more graceful than others…

Hugged by dense forest trees, the stairs up to the shrine were shrouded in fog. It made the whole experience feel more spiritual in a way.

The shrine had a straw circle that you could walk through. It seems its meant for couple to walk through in a figure 8 pattern to symbolize long life together. I think for single people it just symbolizes long life.

There was a gate right on the lake’s shore as well!

Afterwards, we went to a soba shop, which was alright but not as good as the stuff in Tokyo. The noodles themselves lacked something. Nick followed up lunch with karage next door.

We went back to our hotel, which required only one confusing bus transfer. We played lots of ping pong, got sweaty, took a hot bath at the onsen, and had another excellent dinner.

Nick carved into a honeydew melon later that night (he was sorely disappointed it wasn’t cantaloupe). At least the head/stem of it fit very satisfyingly on top of our glasses

We realized late at night that our train ride the following morning to Kyoto would be quite the pretty penny, about $120 for the 2-3 hour journey. Bye bye Hakone!

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)!

The cast: Nick, Forest, and Amelia are three of my friends from Stanford who graduated with me in the same program. Many a night was wasted trying to plan this trip without getting anywhere, but we made it work! Also, Jasper (my roommate) and his cousin Matt joined us for the Hong Kong leg of our journey.

June 19th/20th

Nick, Amelia, Forest and I flew out together from San Francisco early on the 19th via United Airlines.

We got the cheapo tickets which meant we had a 24h journey to Hong Kong with stops in Seattle and Incheon (Seoul). The long leg went by pretty quickly, Forest and I were sitting directly behind Nick and Amelia. Each pair worked on the same crossword and tried to see who finished first, we played lots of liars poker, and the complimentary alcohol helped the flight go a little faster.

In Incheon airport, we had a few hours to kill so we went to a couple lounges (everyone but me has lounge access through Chase) and walked around a bit.

By the time our final flight got us to Hong Kong, it was pretty late so we withdrew some money (meaning I withdrew, and shared the love, since I am the only one who isn’t hit with ATM fees internationally) and got a cab to our Airbnb, where Jasper and Matt were getting settled in.

Friday, June 21st

We got up early (jetlag) and rolled out to some nearby breakfast shop, where I’m sure we annoyed the locals by how clueless we were. They use these cards called “Octopus” cards for getting around on public transport, and it even works in some convenience stores! We bought our octopus (octopi?) cards and took a heavily air conditioned metro train over to Launtau Island.
Here we are on day one of our trip, when we still had some spunk in the mornings.

We caught the glass-bottomed gondola lift towards the Big Buddha (Tian Tan).

It’s pretty strange to see 7-11, Starbucks, and Subway in the little area between the end of the gondola and the stairs leading up to Tian Tan

It lives up to it’s name, it really is a Big Buddha!

Afterwards, we went to the adjacent Po Lin monastery. Some of the rooms inside were super ornate but pictures weren’t allowed. There was a tour guide telling people they could take pictures of the inside from just outside the threshold, but it seemed disrespectful nonetheless. There was one room with 10,000 small golden Buddhas engraved in the walls of the room. Super stuff!

I even ran into someone who is on the team I interned for years ago at Intel. Apparently he always spends a day in Hong Kong on his way to Bangalore!

We had an amazing lunch at the monastery, it was all vegetarian! It’s almost as if I, the only vegetarian in the group, had plotted this ahead of time…

According to Nick and Jasper, the meal was traditional enough! Everyone was quite happy with it.
Taking the gondola back, we started waving to the groups coming the other way. Some people smiled and waved back, some just laughed at us! Harumph.

Back in Tung Chung (the station where we got the gondola) we went into the mall, which had a huge grocery store inside. We got a bunch of random stuff, like yakult, oranges, rice wine (baiju?), etc.

We took a break at our airbnb to cool off since it’s like 90 degrees and 90% humidity. Insane stuff, I think many of us took a second shower.
We started playing a lot of ‘contact’ (a word game) on the trains and as we walked around. Oh and at some point in a subway station I saw this beautiful specimen:

On our way to the bird market, we passed a street absolutely packed with plants! A lot had beautiful orchids, some had the tiniest of cacti:

The bird market itself was depressing. The birds were all being sold in small cages. Also there were lots of insects being sold in tubs, YUCK!

At some point Matt was walking through an area with a lot of pigeons, and took out his umbrella to protect himself from bombardment. He’s a funny guy.

In the evening, we went on a food spree to a bunch of Michelin recommended places. Of course, all of them were meat-centric. There was octopus at the first stall, then dumplings at the next. I was just there to look pretty, not to eat. I later dragged us to a place that I knew had vegetarian food, and Indian restaurant! I was content with my chole batture. In the restaurant and even outside on the streets, all of the AC units seem to drip what I hope is water everywhere. Any time we felt a drop when walking around, we knew it wasn’t rain, it was something worse.

Saturday, June 22nd

We went to some famous dim sum place (Tim Ho Wan?) by like 9 am. I couldn’t eat much, but the others enjoyed themselves quite thoroughly. I subsided on some plain rice noodles with soy sauce and steamed cabbage.

Afterwards, we went to one of those exercise parks for elderly people, since we had no idea what to do anyways.

On the way back to the airbnb, we got these insanely refreshing watermelon drinks. I think its literally just juiced watermelon, but oh man that hit the spot on another sweltering day. We sat at our airbnb for a few hours and played cards to avoid the heat. Although things did end up getting a bit heated during those card games! We played liar’s poker and then variants of Big 2. Cards were intermingled with sips of rice wine that we had to drink out of bowls. That stuff was real pungent but went down ok.

Around 2pm, we ventured out to another Michelin recommended place called Mammy Pancakes. We walked past the shop a couple times before we realized that it was just a 8 or so foot wide place. It was impressively narrow. We got that egg-shell waffle thing, not really sure how to describe it and I can’t seem to find any pictures we took of the food.

We went to Hong Kong Island (there were no protests going on that day) and wandered around this super fancy mall

There was a really nice garden outside with lots of fountains, streams, ponds and the like. For some reason, near one of the ponds, Matt was teaching Jasper and Nick to floss (the dance, not the dental routine). Our little crew must have been an interesting site for the locals.

Afterwards, we went to a fancy tea place and got, well, fancy teas! And they even had VEGETARIAN DIMSUM

We had a lot of fun steeping our various teas and sharing them. It was a really peaceful experience! I got chrysanthemum tea, so thankfully there was no caffeine overload on my end.

They had this really delicious ginger dessert! Definitely something I want to try again wherever I can find it stateside.

We got to see a stamp exhibition upstairs, where they had a bunch of royal stamps (for sealing letters, not for mail!) from throughout history. Some of them were so large that they needed a special instrument to handle.

We ordered an uber all the way up to “The Peak”. Unfortunately the cable car was under repair. Also unfortunate was that we took the uber wayyy too far up. We went to the end of the road, rather than to the touristy vista point. The view we had looked like this:

So we sheepishly walked past the very uber driver who had dropped us off at the top, and was now waiting for a ride back, and went down about 15 minutes to the touristy area.

If you know Nick, then you know he’s been waiting to eat some authentic Dofuhua (a tofu pudding) for a few months now. What we ate at the nearby dessert shop was decidedly not authentic. It was especially disappointing since Nick was hyping it so much.

While Forest and I were waiting for the others to use the restroom, we saw this girl taking a photo of the ceiling. She literally took a photo of the plain ceiling. It’s probably one of the most confusing photos I’ve ever seen taken. Neither Forest nor I could explain the motivation behind it. Life truly is full of mysteries.

We took an uber down to a happening place to eat. It was overwhelming, with people in front of every restaurant begging us to come in. “Happy hour! Free beer!” blah blah blah I was so annoyed I made us go down the street to a relatively sane area. The others went to a Michelin recommended noodle place that doesn’t serve my kind (vegetarians), so I brought over a wrap from next door and ate it beside the others. There was an expat at our table telling us about how he moved here 15 years ago, and what places he recommended for us to visit. Sadly this was our last night in Hong Kong, so we couldn’t make good on his recommendations.

After dinner, we went to a fancy-ish place for drinks. They almost didn’t let us in since none of us were dressed according to the dress code. The place was called Iron Faires, and they had these paper butterflies hanging from the ceiling that really tip-toed the line between tasteful and creepy

We didn’t stay for long, since they started turning the bar into a dance club, which we took as our cue to leave. We just barreled on home.

Sunday, June 23rd

I made the bizarre decision to go on a run in the morning, since I was up early enough. It was the sweatiest 2 mile run I’ve ever attempted in my life. But at least I saw the beautiful waterfront near our airbnb.

Oh and I also got to witness this marvel: I think its a clothing brand?

We had another dimsum breakfast, where I could actually eat a decent amount! There were lots of mushroom based things. Thankfully I ate my fill before the oh-so-appetizing chicken feet were brought out. Afterwards, we cashed out our octopus cards and Nick, Amelia, Forest and I headed to the airport. This is where we part ways with Jasper and Matt, who would go on to explore parts of China. We hurried around the airport so Amelia and Nick could fill out some stupid form that Eva air required for later in the trip (or so we thought [f o r e s h a d o w i n g]) and rushed over to our gate. We flew Hong Kong Express, which was pretty good for a budget airline. Again, we played liar’s poker to kill some time.