JAPAN
Japan 2023 Day 4 - Tokyo
For breakfast on Sunday we went to White Glass in an effort to try out as many local cafes as possible. I forgot my phone for pictures but I thought the coffee was decent and the fruity crumbly cake was good. It seems like in Japan sweets are typically less sweet and more mild than in the US.
We headed over to Yoyogi Park which is an awesome place to walk around. It has a cafe as well, wide pathways and big Torii’s over the pathways. I think it would be better in the spring or summer time when there’s actually flowers and such but we still had a great time. It felt so secluded from the city but there’s a train station right outside.
Some black Koi:
An egret we saw by a pond:
Inside the park is Meiji Jingu, a Shinto shrine. They have a place to make an offering and you can buy wooden tablets to write your wish on. We also saw a wedding procession which was pretty cool.
We stopped by the park vending machines on our way out to try some new stuff. I got hot lemonade which was uh, not very good. But the hot corn in a can is great! I learned from the Safiya Nygaard video that there is 1 vending machine for every 23 people in Japan.
From there we headed over to Harajuku. We walked through one of the busier shopping streets. There are all kinds of stores with all kinds of stuff and clothes.
Lunch was also pretty brutal today. That part of town is very touristy and crowded and all the restaurants were full or had insane wait times. We tried Kura Sushi which has branches in the US of course but we thought it’d be big enough to have a shorter wait time. Some people had been waiting for several hours there!
We ended up going for fast food at a food marketplace called K-Town Harajuku It ended up being incredible – it’s got a bunch of Korean food options in stalls so we could all try different things and best of all it was quick. I got sweet and spicy fried chicken and got a cheesy waffle for dessert.
Sustained, we headed to B-SIDE LABEL to shop for some sticker souvenirs.
First I was enchanted by the tiny shopping basket. You can also see how adorable some of their Pokemon stickers are in the background.
They have a whole sticker catalogue if you don’t see the Pokemon you want or if you’re looking for something else specific. I ended up buying something like 20 USD worth of stickers.
For the evening we joined our friend who lives in Japan for his dodgeball group’s Sunday game. It was a ton of fun and actually a really hard work out. They were very chill with five new people joining in impromptu.
They have a cafe they like to go to after the games called Whiz Cafe. It’s on the small side but the food was exceptionally good. We had a drink or two here with the dodgeball folks where I met a friend of my boyfriend’s who lives in Japan and speaks very little English. I got to use a few of my key phrases I learned from Duolingo the past few months!
It was around 10:30 PM and we had originally had the idea we might do karaoke tonight but we were feeling pretty tired so we decided to hit up an onsen instead. We went to a kinda fancy one called Thermae-yu. You pay for a block of time, something like 11 or 12 hours so you should really go during the day.
This place has more than just tubs, you could get a massage, eat food at their restaurant, or literally go down to the basement and take a nap on a couch. It was already late for us though so we just enjoyed the hot tubs.
I went to a nude hot spring on my Oregon road trip but this is a little different because it’s segregated by gender and you’re not really expected to socialize with strangers in a Japanese onsen. I thought the facilities were nice and I had a good time trying out different tubs. The hot water made me so sleepy!