Our Nihon Trip Part I

I recently returned from my trip to Japan. The country was just as I recalled: fun and filled with good eats. We were also constantly impressed by their collective culture as well as consistent punctuality and kindness; unfortunately, not all cultures and countries are alike. Because P and I have both been to Tokyo before and we know that their transportation system is very convenient, plus I do remember some survival Japanese from high school, so we decided to plan our own trip and go on our own without joining one of those a million places in one day tours advertised. Although I must give credit to a lot of the great planning from our friend L for really practically planning the whole trip for us. We would recommend others to go on their own too, especially if you can read their Chinese borrowed Japanese kanji.

I'm too lazy to post all the photos here again, so I will only post a few but if you want to check the rest out, please go to my facebook albums.

Tokyo album
Osaka & Kyoto album

Day 1:

On the plane & losing time from time zone differences

Day 2:

Arrived evening time. Courtesy of L, we got free limousine bus tickets that were worth 3000 yen each; the bus brought us directly to our hotel. Anyone could've purchased the same tickets at the airport too; the airport staff can speak English. We stayed at Ikebukuro's Sunshine City Prince, which was right next to the huge Sunshine City mall. According to our Chinese guide book, there's a place called Namja Town there filled with gyoza places to eat! Gyozas are one of my favourite foods, so of course we went! In addition, this was the closest food option on a VERY cold and windy Japan night when P and I were both starving and exhausted from jet lag and plane riding.

It was slightly difficult to find the "town" in the huge mall; luckily, the Info desk person was very helpful. When we arrived at the entrance of the "town," it reminded us of an amusement park. We later discovered that these types of themed places with food and entertainment were popular in Japan. We were at first hesitant to go in because we had to pay an entrance fee but paid anyway after some discussion..really it was only about 2 bucks Cdn. It was worth it! We tried many types of gyozas and wished we had room for more.

Then, they also had an icecream town in there filled with all kinds of icecream. We also discovered that Japan's icecream and milk seem to be more rich and better than those found in Canada. Although we were stuffed from the gyozas, P convinced me that we had to have icecream, so we did. Our eating parade did not end, however, on our walkabout through Namja town (came with map and everything...a big place...sometimes with games that we had no idea how to play) we came upon dessert land! But really, I couldn't put anymore food in my mouth. Did P give up though? No! He convinced me that we absolutely had to buy a piece of their No.1 (they like to rate everything in terms of popularity for customers at all stores in Japan...I kind of like that.) chocolate cake for breakfast!

On our way back to the hotel, we stopped at their 24 hr Family Mart (kind of like our 7 Eleven, except better with more stuff) to buy some bottled water (we later saved the little yen we budgeted for water to buy more food by boiling our own...Japan's tap water is supposedly drinkable anyway) and Nissin curry cup noodles for breakfast. Cheap, convenient and tasty. A notable mention of the building logistics, where they cleverly built an inside passage way from hotel, to family mart, to mall without having to walk outside just like many of their shopping is connected to ther railway stations underground...why can't we have more of this in Canada?

To be continued...