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Japan – Day 2 (Tokyo)

To be honest, what makes me love Japan isn’t necessarily the endless ancient buildings or sightseeing opportunities or shopping or other touristy stuff…it’s the language, the culture, the people, and the little comforts and quirks and complete unexpected randomness. For example, I love that you can order from a machine, and you push a button when you need something instead of having a waitress. I love that everyone lines up and takes turns, I love the deep soaking tubs, the weighted blankets, the funny TV shows even if I don’t understand it all. How people respect and care about each other but also don’t give a fuck and come up with the craziest, wildest stuff. That’s what I enjoy about being here. So when I woke up this morning at 6am to my alarm going off I couldn’t be bothered to move from the cocoon I had made myself with this glorious cooling weighted blanket that’s standard here. I pretty much dozed in fluffy comfort (but with a firm pillow and mattress underneath because orthopaedics is a priority too) and watched NHK for 3 hours, just enjoying being here and not running around. FYI, the music for the weather forecast section of the news literally has not changed in 15 years. Plus, funny enough, they were doing a segment about Hikone Castle and how it was built and its history and stuff, so I took it as a sign to stay in and watch. Finally my stomach decided it was time to get up, so I got dressed and headed to the Starbucks at Shibuya crossing and had a mocha while watching the insanity down below for a while. Then I hopped on the train to TeamLab Borderless.

I’ve spent a lot of time in Tokyo already and seen most of the big tourist sights, but there have been some new additions in the last 15 years that piqued my interest so I specifically came to see those. TeamLab Borderless is a fully immersive art exhibit using light, sound/music, mirrors, temperature, smells, and touch to really get people into their exhibits and see how beautiful they are. They don’t give you a map, and the entire area is in darkness with juuuust enough light along the floors to not trip over your own feet, the idea is you go in and explore. There are rooms with strands of LED lights and mirrors floor to ceiling that make it look like it’s raining, a lantern room where I almost smacked into a mirror because you get so distracted, a balloon room, smoke light room, glass projection room, flower garden room, a digital waterfall, so so many rooms I’m still not sure I got them all even though I was there for over 2 hours. Still, I think I did except for the birds nest which had over an hour wait, so I headed out and waved quickly to the Rainbow Bridge and took the train back to Shibuya.

After getting some ramen, I strolled through part of Yoyogi Park and headed to Meiji Jingu since Google said it was open until 6pm, but when I got there at 4pm they were just closing the gates. Guess it’s sun up to sun down this time of year. No biggie, I walked a little further and went to Takeshita Street in Harajuku. It’s not Sunday so I only saw a small handful of the “Harajuku girls” but I did find the Totti Candy Factory and got one of those ridiculously gigantic cotton candy cones. Thing was 3x bigger than my head. People that know me know I can handle a lot of sugar, but even I couldn’t eat all of that. I also found a place selling nice chopsticks and had him engrave my katakana name onto them.

I passed on the exotic animal cafés, I’ve heard horror stories about them and keeping the exotic animals in poor condition…but I did come across a pet pig café. I figured pigs are domestic, so it was probably okay, plus I had never pet a pet pig before. There was only a 10 minute wait so I stuck around until I could go in. They had 6 or 7 pigs running around and they were adorable. They mostly came to me for ear scritches but there were four that had found their way into the laps of people with black pants (ALL black pants, they didn’t seem to care about anyone else with any other colors on, just FYI if you go!) They were cute, and seemed happy enough. I’d still eat them if they were made into bacon though.

Afterwards, I wandered back to the hotel to take advantage of another of those little comforts I mentioned earlier, the famous Japanese deep soaking tub! After being in Europe and Thailand where they favor showers over tubs 95% of the time to the point where they don’t even have tubs, getting into that deep soaking tub was like heaven. I relaxed and searched stuff for my next destinations until I started to get pruney. Now I’m going to try to go to sleep early so I can wake up super early tomorrow!

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Off to Japan! – Day 1

JAPAN I AM IN YOU! My God as soon as I stepped foot off the Narita Express at Shibuya it all hit me at once. The neon lights, the endless chatter, the hustle and bustle, the smell of noodles and curry and all sorts of food and desserts of every flavor everywhere…it was like coming back home. I didn’t realize how much I missed it all until just now!

My flight out of Bangkok left at 8am so I had to wake up at 4am to leave at 5am. I forced myself to stay awake during the flight, so by the time we landed in Japan at 4pm I was starving. For some reason an American coming to Japan from Thailand alarmed the customs person (HA!) so I got pulled off to the side to check my backpack, but of course there is nothing bad in there and her asking questions led to me telling her about my trip around the world. She asked if I had been to Japan before, and I told her I used to live here in college and used to be able to speak Japanese conversationally fluent but not so much anymore, so then she switched to Japanese and let me practice for a bit (it wasn’t busy at customs today).

I figured once I got here I’d remember things fast, but I didn’t expect just HOW fast. It’s all coming back to me, like riding a bicycle. Before the end of the night I was at a shoe store talking with the older staff who didn’t know English, since I needed to replace my non-waterproof walking shoes that I threw away in Paris. At first they didn’t seem sure if they should help me, but then I called them over and started asking questions and stuff in Japanese and I think the main guy helping me was surprised at first and then seemed happy and ready to assist. Then again I was buying his stuff so, eh, may be unrelated. The point is I got some decent, inexpensive waterproof walking shoes for the next 24 days and didn’t need to use a word of English nor any charade games to get them.

Prior to that I went to Ichiran for some ramen, but after getting my shoes, walking around Shibuya at the crossing, and saying hello to my old buddy Hachiko my stomach decided it was still hungry. I stopped and got a small udon serving…but although my stomach was now full, my eyes and mouth were still hungry so I got some sushi and an onigiri from 7-11. I had to remind myself that I was going to be here a while and didn’t need to eat everything RIGHT NOW. It was past 9pm at that point, so I hiked back to the hotel to start booking activity tickets for the Tokyo area. This is going to be awesome!

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Thailand – Day 12 (Bangkok)

I need to start getting into the habit of waking up early. In Japan, you need to get to everything as the sun rises to avoid the crowds. Today I failed at this, again. My alarm went off at 6am but I laid in bed snoozing every 10 minutes until after 7am. Then I got up and made coffee and sat on my balcony overlooking Wat Arun for an hour just reading and getting caffeinated. Then I went down for breakfast, and this place actually has real BACON! Not just cheap ham cut to look like bacon but for real bacon. It was an unexpected surprise and a good start to the day!

My first stop was Wat Pho, which houses this massive reclining Buddha statue. It was super-hot and the place was busy, but it’s a huge place and really neat to walk around and look at everything. After that I headed to Wat Ratchapradit Sathitmahasimaram (no I can’t pronounce it either), and although it was a much smaller temple the elaborate glass work on it was top notch. There were also a lot of birds here, so I sat for a while and listened to them sing. The next stop was the Grand Palace and the Temple of the Emerald Buddha. The temple is supposedly the most famous and most sacred temple in Thailand, and because of that the place was PACKED. This is the first and only place I’ve been to in Thailand where you were really shoulder to shoulder and I had to move my purse to my front and cover it with my hand to avoid pickpockets. It was gorgeous, but for the crowd and the price I don’t think I’d recommend it. Plus the Emerald Buddha statue is tiny and way up on a pillar thing so you can’t even really see it and I have good eyesight. I moved through the temple fairly quickly just to get out of the crowd and went to the Palace, but you can’t even go inside, you can only look at the exterior so that was disappointing too. But, I got to see the Thai version of the “changing of the guards” which was neat, and the ticket included a free shuttle to the Royal Theater where you got to watch a Khon show with English subtitles so you knew what the heck was going on. That was really fun, I enjoyed it. After the show was over I walked back to the hotel and got some cashew chicken and rice for a linner/dunch, and cooled off in my room for a bit while the sun set outside my window.

I didn’t plan it this way, but today is Loy Krathong. In fact, if I had planned it better I wish I was in Chiang Mai tonight since it’s a waaaay bigger festival there with lanterns in the water and in the air. But, I’m in Bangkok, and I read that Wat Arun was a big place to be for the festivities so I hopped on a rickety ferry across the river to check it out. Unfortunately the temple itself was closed, but the party was going on outside. There was food, games, music, theater and hundreds of people walking around with various lanterns to put into the water.

For those not familiar, Loy Krathong is actually a bit of a hypocritical festival. People make these wreath things with candles, often out of plastic, light them up and put them in the river to thank the gods for the water and…apologize for…polluting the water? Yeah, so put plastic trash in the water to apologize to the gods for putting plastic trash into the water, haha! It seems like people are starting to catch on to this and even though there were still plastic krathongs there were more made out of organic plants, fruits and flowers. I wanted to participate, but didn’t want to throw anything into the already polluted river, so instead I donated some money to the temple monks who then gave you a little tea candle type thing in a reusable flower cup and you lit that and floated it in a nearby pool. True, it’s not a zero waste method, but better than the alternative. After hanging out for a bit, I hopped back on the ferry to Wat Pho. In hindsight, I should have done Wat Arun during the day when it was open, because Wat Pho was still open and now for free including the reclining Buddha. So I wandered around there again since there were far less people than in the morning, and watched some of the shows on the stage. It was getting late and I still needed to pack up for my trip to Japan tomorrow, so I called it a night and now I’m packing things up. Can’t believe it’s time for Japan already!