Tokyo

Konichiwa! We caught an early flight out of Hanoi on Monday, zooming straight to Japan for the next leg of our trip. If we manage everything carefully, we're hoping to make that the last flight of the year 😳 more on that plan in the next few months...

Anyway: Tokyo! 🗼 We're in a sensible, developed country where everything runs on time, you can pay on card, the streets are clean and the people are reserved and polite. What a shift from Southeast Asia. The most important difference is the temperate weather—we can wear trousers and walk around the city without sweating buckets. We never thought we'd be so happy in a fine drizzle, but it's a huge relief.

Dan has been to Japan before and speaks some Japanese, so is in charge of organising our itinerary here. We had four full days to see the main sights in Tokyo, and crammed quite a lot in, which would take too long to detail here but we are happy to talk about with anyone who's interested. Now, onto the fun stories:

📵 Dan got off to a good start with his Japanese by mishearing a waitress offering us wasabi, and thought she was asking for his WhatsApp.

🤡 Chelsea discovers that everyone in Japan is attired in fashionable greyscale. She is extremely out of place walking through the business district in bright yellow trousers like a children's TV presenter.

🗑️ Dan gets his fortune told ('excellent good luck') at the museum, and then proceeds to miss every single basketball shot at an interactive art exhibit. Maybe not so lucky after all...

🤮 We stayed in a 'capsule hotel' in upmarket Akasaka, which was surprisingly affordable. But we did come down one morning to find cold puke on the common room floor. Make of that what you will.

🐼 One of the stalls in the Tsukiji fish market advertises its wares with a stuffed panda, polar bear, leopard and lynxes. Dan's ten years of marketing experience still cannot compute this strategy. Not where we thought we would see our first panda in Asia to be honest.

🚽 High tech toilets with heated seats that automatically come up and go down when they sense you entering the stall. Also, music played while enthroned, for privacy. Not to mention the bum jets. If you know, you know.

⚛️ An exhibit at the Museum of Emerging Technology and Innovation which lets you learn about quantum computing through DJing. We still don't understand quantum computing, and we learned that we don't understand DJing either.

🏉 Getting stuck into the ubiquitous high balls and sake with salarymen in a rugby-themed bar in Golden Gai. After two hours Dan told them his name, only to find out that the owner's name was also Dan-san, and the izakaya’s name was eponymous too. They complimented his 'very natural' Japanese, but we think maybe this was just politeness.

As well as our rugby friends, we also met a few others in Tokyo. We reconnected with Tatsuya, a very nice Japanese man who we met briefly in Cambodia. We talked to two Yorkshiremen in a tiny izakaya who were debating whether to order pork womb or intestines (womb won). We had a long, 2am chat with two Welshmen, the first of whom was in Japan to rescue the second, who has basically ruined his own life through a series of questionable marriages but was quite upbeat about it. And we sat in an izakaya with two middle-aged Japanese 'rockstars' (so they claimed), whose only English was to shout "be careful!" whenever anyone went to the bathroom—somehow not as sinister as you might expect.

Most importantly we had two evenings with Chelsea's cousin Kevin, who has been living in Tokyo for nine years (and kindly provided an address for our train passes to be delivered). He is just finishing his current job, so we managed to invite ourselves to his leaving party, an unexpected opportunity to drink full pints of Aspalls cider in the Hobgoblin 'English pub' in central Tokyo. Drinks were on Kevin's company account, which was very handy given the cost of Japan in general!

Despite being warned that Tokyo is overrun with tourists, we found it surprisingly quiet and manageable, especially compared to Thailand, Vietnam, etc. Perhaps being here in the low season helps. It’s a culture shock in the best possible way, and so far, Japan is even more impressive than expected!Read more