Visiting Japan....

A few months ago, I said to a friend, "Hey, let's take a girl's trip somewhere!" My idea was that a few of us would go somewhere within the region, but a place that was a little pricey for family travel. We'd check it out over a long weekend while the dads were home to watch the kids, and if we loved it, then we could consider taking the whole family one day. Genius, right? ;) (Well, maybe just a convenient excuse to hit the road without dragging along the younglings, but it is what it is.)

I suggested Japan, and Joy and Eugenia agreed that it sounded like a good plan. Plane tickets were bought, and a hotel was booked. And that was about the extend of the planning. :) We knew we wanted to bop around Tokyo and eat good food and shop. We would only have a few days, so we couldn't get too ambitious.

The first day was a little rough. We got off the plane, and things got confusing from there. We bought the wrong train tickets into Tokyo from Narita and ended up taking a long train with multiple stops. We also discovered that the Tokyo subway is really made up of rail lines operated by 6 different companies and "subway" really means "Subway, Inc." That can make for some stressful times when you've got a map that isn't showing the lines of the train you're riding on, and you're being reassured by a Japanese hipster that you're still on the right train, but he doesn't speak a ton of English, so....

We made it to our stop, after a decent amount of asking around and wandering metro stations, and when we did get off, Google Maps immediately started taking us in circles. The hotel was in a business district, and there weren't a lot of English speakers to help. I went into a restaurant and showed the guy inside the hotel address, and he just looked at me and said, "No, no, no." We stared at each other, and then I walked out.

We finally hailed a cab, and an angelic Japanese lady stopped to help us. She spoke to the taxi driver for us, and we loaded our suitcases... and then a lady walked up, and she and the taxi driver started yelling at each other in Japanese. The Japanese Angel explained quietly that she had called this cab, and he thought we were her. Our suitcases were quickly and unceremoniously dumped back on the sidewalk. Japanese Angel walked us to a main street and helped us flag down another cab and explained the address to the cab driver.

After we got to the hotel, I wondered how bad it would be to just stay in my room and watch Netflix all weekend? That bad? Maybe not? :)

After an hour to calm down and take deep, cleansing breaths, we ventured outside our hotel to get dinner... within a 2 block radius of the hotel after making careful note of landmarks. ;)

It was Friday night in Tokyo, and we were eating dinner with a lot of Japanese businessmen and women, ties loosened and having a beer after work. I ate some of the best and freshest gyoza of my life. We were doing this thing.

I took this picture to help me find our hotel again. It was a great little hotel, and it wasn't terribly expensive and was centrally located. It's the Tosei Cocone Kanda, and you'll find it within a very short walk of the JR Kanda Station, West Entrance. You'll see this view when you exit. Walk this direction, and then fire up Google Maps. :)

We decided to stay on the JR line, so the next day, we bought a tourist pass at the JR Kanda station. For 750 yen, you can ride the line all day, which takes away some of the stress of possibly going the wrong way on a line and having to figure it out coming back. We got a map, and we headed to Ueno Park. Ueno Park is large park complete with the zoo, several national museums, some shrines, etc. It's a good place to get started if you're a clueless tourist.

650 yen will get you a day pass to the National Museums. We got the audio tour for another 500 yen. (The exchange rate is roughly 100 yen to one U.S. dollar.)

An ancient scroll depicting a story of a rat that tricks a Japanese girl into marrying him. This is her noticing that his attendants are all rats and starting to get a little suspicious.

We walked out of Ueno Park into a local business district as the sun was setting, and we stumbled onto an arcade. A guy on the plane into Narita had told me about these photo filter machines in arcades that will make you look like a 17-year-old anime pin up. We did a group shot and single shots 'cause it was so much fun. :)

The Japanese love vending machines. We paid for our meal here using the machine, and then a ticket came out. We gave it to the cook, and she gave us hot, fresh, fragrant bowls of soba or udon noodles and broth, which we then ate at a long counter with chopsticks.

This is a hand battered corn dog, studded with bits of potato, and then deep fried. 

Gotta love animal shaped bread from a bakery near Ueno Park. The pandas were filled with cream cheese. I'm wishing I'd bought more of them.

The second day, we went shopping at Takeshita Street. This is the entrance, right across from the JR station. We roamed the shops full of secondhand kimonos, Japanese Star Wars shirts, food themed squishy toys, and the mother of all 100 yen stores. I get really excited about dollar stores, and this was a 3 story one full of Japanese items. Daiso was like a museum where you could buy all the things and take them home! (If your luggage allowance would allow.) I went a little crazy. We all did. And then we had to rent a locker right across the street to store our stuff before we could keep going. :)

We walked and ate and shopped until we were footsore and drooping, and then we headed back to our hotel. The next morning, we took the JR line to Ueno Park, took a short walk from that station to the Keisei Skyliner Station, and picked up the Skyliner back to Narita. This was much faster than the slow train we took into town, and I highly recommend it when coming into Tokyo from Narita.

I'm not really a city person, and I was honestly a little surprised by how much I enjoyed Tokyo. This Japanese city just feels so different from other cities I've visited. The food is fresh and delicious, and I am admittedly a pretty picky eater. The Japanese do things precisely and well, even their "fast food." The architecture and ways they use machinery, even the compact way they put together a hotel bathroom, the way you can pick from a variety of pillow styles in the hotel lobby, the vending machines, the different foods... it's all fascinating to me. This was a really enjoyable Far Eastern cultural immersion.

Also, it's pretty rare that I do a girl's trip. As much as I enjoy traveling with all my boys, they are boys. It doesn't even enter my mind at this point in my life to plan a day of shopping or going to a spa when I travel with my family. :) No one in my family is interested in doing girly things except for me, and that actually hadn't occurred to me until I was on a trip where I could do girly things. Hey, I like doing girly things sometimes! Maybe I should try and do them occasionally. It's fun! ;)