Day 71-72

Day 71

After a 12 hour bus consisting of no sleep for me, a beautiful sun rise and lots of mixed opinions about the pull down hoods and main lights turning on every 2 hours we arrived at Shinjuku bus terminal in Tokyo at 6.30am. Stumbling off the bus we put our bags in a coin locker for safe keeping and then managed to find a cafe that was open to have a coffee and a much needed sandwich and debated how we were going to kill time up until 4pm when we could check into our hostel.

We decided at 8am we would head over to our hostel and drop our bags off there so that we didn’t have to trek back to the bus terminal later in the day to pick them up again. Arriving at the hostel we were very confused when the man at reception said we didn’t have a reservation. Then we realised there were 4 hostels in Tokyo with the exact same name which is really helpful! Heading to the right one we dumped our bags before heading off towards the nearest park where I crashed for 30 minutes to have a Power nap. Feeling marginally more rested we headed over to the Tokyo skytree thinking that because we got there at opening time the queue would be really short, how wrong we were! We decided neither of us wanted to queue 30 minutes to go up when we had already seen some good views of Tokyo earlier in our trip so we headed to the aquarium that was next door that had no queue at all!

After this we visited a few temples and wondered through some early morning markets before stumbling across another puppy cafe. Thinking it was a good way to pass some time we headed in and to my utter dismay all the dogs didn’t want to have a cuddle with me and just with Jacob! I was not happy at all and I’m very much looking forward to seeing my own doggies at home!

Settling in for a big bowl of ramen we wasted some more time until we stumbled across the ninja samurai museum. We thought this could be quite interesting but they started by dressing us up as samurais which wasn’t quite what we expected, but then gave a very interesting and detailed talk of the history of the samurai and Japan. He explained the hierarchy of society in Japan starting with merchants, then craftsmen farmers and fishermen, followed on by ronin then Samurai, Daimyo which are the leaders of each clan, then the Shogun who is the ruler of Japan and head of the Samurai and then of course at the top is the emperor who is the symbolic leader of Japan.

After the talk we got to have a go at a throwing stars range which was quite fun and a bit harder than it looks!

Eventually after what felt like an eternity it was 4pm and we checked in and zonked out for the rest of the day.

Day 72

Today was shopping day. After a very lazy morning we headed to the markets and HUGE departments stores filled with everything you could ever imagine. One shop chain called Don Quijote is just massive. 5 floors packed with everything from toothbrushes to fake food key rings to matcha it’s like stepping into a different world. With isles packed to the brim and loud blasting music we felt exhausted coming out!

We spent a total of 6 HOURS shopping today, and my feet were definitely complaining by the end of it but we did get some really nice bits and I’ve got everything I wanted so far! We’ve bought a small hand luggage suitcase for Jacobs carry on for the plane to try and help us get everything back as our bag are bulging more every day!

Enjoying the view from our hostel rooftop of the sky tree we rounded off another day just enjoying the cityscape.Læs mere