Tokyo: Diary Entry #8

Hi hi butterflies,

I just spend my first week in Japan, and boy was it something!

The first day we didn't do much, we were very tired from all the traveling so we first slept in the hotel for a few hours and at night went to get a bowl of ramen, walked a bit through the town and got a card for the trains so we could travel easily.

The second day the journey really began, we got up at 8, because at 10 we were gonna have a tour trough a part of tokyo. I'm saying 'a part', cuz Tokyo is MASSIVE, it has about the same amount of people living there as the entirety of the Netherlands. You'd think that Tokyo is just a city, but it's basically just a whole country excisting of a whole lot of littler cities. When I first heard we were going on a tour I wasn't too excited, I thought we were gonna go to all the tourist traps and stuff and it would be the standard tourist tour. But I was wrong.
Our tour guide was the biggest nerd, and instead of taking us to tourist traps, he took us to what he called 'geek town', a big part of Tokyo that is just made for the biggest nerds, anime and Pokémon everywhere. Games, just everything. It was something i'd never seen before. There were complete nerd shopping malls with only nerd shops, and these malls were TEN STORIES TALL, and every story was AMAZINGLY BIG. We ate lunch on the 7th story of a very tall shopping mall, that entire story was dedicated to food, and we ate in a sushi restaurant. Cool thing about the restaurants here in Japan, almost every restaurant here in japan just has a screen where you order from and it just gets brought to your table, NO HUMAN CONTACT YAY!!! In the case of this sushi restaurant, the sushi got brought by a little card that glided along a track that went past all the tables until it got to your table at which it stopped. We also went to the biggest crossing in the world, I expected more from that to be honest, there wasn't much too see, it was just veryyy busy. After the tour we looked around at the part where the biggest crossing was, visited a few shops. I got a Close Encounters of the Third Kind vinyl there very nice, ive been looking for that for a long time. And at the end of the day waited about an hour in line to eat some food that wasn't very amazing or anything…

The next morning we ate breakfast at a French bakery, and you might think: whot, ur in Japan, why would you eat French breakfast. Well, turns out the people in Japan eat very western breakfast, just break and yogurt and stuff. Also, they love apple juice. We started the day by going to a mall, even bigger than the day before… SIXTY STORIES TALL WATTAFAK. There was a massive pokemon store in there but it was closed noooooo:(
After that we went to a little town with a lot of vintage shops and record stores which was quit cool, was also a bit more quite than the rest of Tokyo which was nice and i got a Star Wars vinyl there that I've wanted for very long (return of the jedi). We ate dinner at a delicious Korean restaurant (i know im in Japan, not in Korea).

The last day in Tokyo we wanted to go back to that geek-town, cuz we only saw a tiny bit and we wanted to do japanese shopping there, there isn't very much to talk about that day. I got three pokemon cards, a little Hatsune Miku figure that i can put on my books when i get home and, the best purchase of my life... A GAMEBOY COLOR. I bought it in a lovely old retro gameshop, they had all kinds of old Nintendo consoles and games and stuff. And i got my red Gameboy color there, together with Mario Land 2.

The fifth day in Japan we left Tokyo with the Shinkansen, a bullet train that can go up to 300km an hour!!! Cool thing about these trains, the chairs can turn, so theyre always facing the way in which ur riding, so that you never ride backwards. We went to Takayama, a more quite town in nature. We stayed in a small hotel like place, you werent allowed to wear shoes inside so you had to put on the slippers provided by the place. There was one shower for all the guests and only three sinks to brush your teeth. Also, another thing thats very normal in japan, every toilet has like a thousand buttons, literally anything you could think of to add to a toilet, they have it here (i can never find the flush button...). The rest of the day we walked trough the town a bit, didn't do very much cuz we already traveled the entire day and we were quite tired.

The next day, were on Tuesday Juli 28th now, we took it easy, didn't get up early in the morning. We went to a retro museum with all kinds of japanese retro stuff. It was cool, but eventually i found a Space Invaders game machine (one of my favourite games ever), and there was a highscore on that, so i locked in to beat that highscore. It took me about three hours but eventually i defeated the highscore with a score of 3.183.982, which was about a hundred thousand points above the previous highscore.
That night we ate dinner at Hama-Sushi, it's basically the fastfood sushi chain in Japan, and it was suprisingly good, and fast! You order something on the screen and a few minutes later it gets delivered on a little track to your table.

Then we get to the seventh day in Japan, and the last day I'll be writing about in this blog. We ate breakfast at 'Eat Books', a book cafe which was very cool. We walked trough Takayama, very pretty old town. I bought a 'my neighbour totoro' puzzle there. And at the end of the day we ate a bowl of nice ramen!

That was my first week in Japan, sorry that i can't go in full detail about the trip, i really don't have much time T-T

I'm gonna sleep again now!

Luuk... out. (For today, anyway.)

yum yum