Japan Again! - Tokyo - Oct 09

After returning home from my first trip to Japan all I could think about was returning. I started going to all the local japanese restaurants to satisfy my soba cravings, I hunted down japanese supermarkets in search of mochi, royal milk tea, plum wine and sake. I searched for something similar to the ever elusive hoba miso. I stopped taking public transport after a tram arrived over 5 minutes late. Fellow australians were starting to get on my nerves when they coughed and spluttered without the courtesy of putting on a mask. I failed to find any clothes as fashionable as the ones girls were wearing in Tokyo. Showers weren't the same. Cleanliness started to become an issue - I needed that glow, that squeaky clean feeling you can only get after hopping in an onsen. Even trips to the toilet had somehow become worse... how could I be discrete with no fake flushing noises and volume control? Why did the hand dryers take so LONG here? WHY WAS LIFE BECOMING SO MUCH HARDER?

In the meantime, I had started to book a trip to Malaysia. Just a ten day trip for a bit of a break and also I always need something to motivate me at work. After booking my plane tickets and leave and researching things to do in Malaysia it hit me. Malaysia seemed boring... EVERYWHERE seemed boring compared to Japan. My planned trip to Malaysia had turned into a luxury resort island getaway and I realised with the budget I had for the trip, I could easily just go back to Japan for a guaranteed amazing time. So I booked tickets. I booked hotels. I booked rail passes. I wasted over 700 bucks on unused airfares to malaysia... but you know what? I regret nothing.

Tokyo - Day 1

Back in Japan. That reassuring feel. Incredibly polite men in impeccable suits guiding me through customs, orderly lines, informative signs everywhere. It is all so familiar, head to the JR counter and get my railpass in under two minutes. The Narita Express arrives and leaves like clockwork - to the very second. The train is spotlessly clean, the seats comfortable, multimedia displays all over the train showing news, weather, travel time. It's like coming home.

Before I start going off on tangents though I should go over what we had planned for this trip. Initially I yearned to explore the south of japan - Yakushima, Mt Aso, Miyazaki. I tried a gazillion ways of trying to fit a trip to the south of Japan into 10 days, but there was no way I could do it justice in such a short period of time. In the back of my head I knew that this would be far from the last trip I would make back to Japan so I decided to opt for something else. 10 days really would make for a nice relaxing trip redoing some of the things we had rushed or missed out on on the first trip. And so it was that we would make our way back to Tokyo for a few days, and back to the Takayama region - the highlight of the first trip even though we had only stayed for one night in the area. This time we were going to stay two nights, and then three nights in the surrounding region. Five nights in Hida = five nights of hida beef in hoba miso.

Back to the tangents. For our stay in Tokyo we decided since this was a much shorter trip, we could afford to stay in a nicer hotel for the entire stay. We had really enjoyed Keio Plaza in Shinjuku, just a really nice location from the station and also a great hotel. As soon as we arrived we wanted to hit Shinjuku for some food but we were exhausted and starving and decided maybe we could just grab a burger on the way to the hotel. Like a local I weaved through the crowds through subways until I reached a Lotteria. This trip definitely had a different feel. I bloody well knew how to navigate from memory to the nearest burger joint! We ate our delicious teeny tiny burgers and headed off to Keio. We checked into the hotel and dumped our bags in the room, we also exchanged awkward glances with the porter as we still didn't know if we were meant to tip him. Who invented tipping anyway? It makes life so confusing - who to tip, where to tip, how much to tip. Ugh.