It’s hard to even know where to start on our visit to Tokyo as we’ve experienced so much since we’ve been here and loved it all. Tokyo is an amazing city and given its metro population is 40M, we are stunned that Tokyo is so clean, so safe, so bike friendly and with an incredible public transportation system on top of all of that. I think most North American cities could learn a thing or two from Tokyo! We’ve been exclusively travelling by public transportation and, with a mix of Google Maps and a good-old paper map, have been managing to get around with only occasional missteps. We’re staying in a tiny room in a tiny hotel and we are all comforted to know that this is probably our tightest quarters on the whole trip – it’s working out, despite the smelly shoes from four boys in the close quarters. (Hotel is The Sakura Cross Hotel East Annex and I would highly recommend)
We’ve completely filled our days with lots of time just wandering around neighbourhoods and the steps are clocking up. We like to measure steps using Lucas’ fitbit, as he definitely does the most steps with his short stride, and we hit a new record of 30K steps yesterday (being at DisneySea definitely helped, more on that later). Today we declared a rest day after days of intense touristing but still did about 6 hours of eating out and cruising around the city because, as I explained to the kids, spending too much time in a small hotel room with the whole family is definitely not restful for the adults.
So, without going into too much detail about everything we’ve done and seen here, I’ll going through some of the highlights.
Browsing the shops
In general we’re not big shoppers, but we’ve all enjoyed browsing around the shops in the various neighbourhoods around the city. The mega stores for electronics, gaming, cards, everything are fascinating with their size and scope. We’ve perhaps spent more time looking at Pokemon cards than I would have chosen however….
Eating out
Given we all love ramen and sushi we knew we’d be happy eating in Tokyo. One of the highlights was at Zauo Restaurant where you catch a live fish yourself right in the restaurant and then they’ll prepare it for you into sushi within minutes.
Pokemon Cafe and Center
There’s a long story that I won’t go into (about getting up at 2AM two nights in a row in Toronto to get a reservation at this cafe which sells out in 10 seconds), except to say that this was the #1 priority attraction for the kids so I actually paid some random guy on Facebook with a bot to get us a reservation. It however did not disappoint, and the kids loved being surrounded by Pokemon and eating Pokemon shaped food, so it was worth it. And, in the spirit of sharing the good-bad-and-ugly on this blog, I’ll add that I unfortunately spent part of lunch throwing up after having what I think was food poisoning (from elsewhere). The highlight of this experience was my Google Translate exchange through my phone with one of the servers making sure I was okay and the “proper disposal of vomit”.
Skating at the Nagano Oval
I think this will be my last mention of speed skating for a while, but to end the season we went speed skating on the Olympic 400M oval in Nagano. It’s a bit of a haul from Tokyo, but the Shinkansen (high speed) train made it doable for a day trip. It was open to the public and much busier than the kids were used to but I felt right at home with the beginner skaters shuffling around the ice.
DisneySea
Despite rainy and cold weather, we had super-fun day at Tokyo’s unique DisneySea. Impressive atmosphere and lots of classic and thrilling rides. Going on a weekday meant that the park was full of teenagers and twenty-somethings instead of the usual families, and wow, were those kids ever dressed to the nines – mini-skirts and mickey-ears galore.
teamLab Planets
We visited one of of the incredible digital art museums in Tokyo: teamLab Planets. It’s an immersive experience with plays on light. Definitely worthwhile!
Senso-ji Temple
To mix in a history lesson, we visited the Senso-Ji Temple, an ancient Buddhist temple which is apparently the most visited religious site in the world. It had been completely rebuilt post-WWII and was a reminder to us of how much Japan has evolved since then. We purchased two fortunes at the Temple and one was good and one was bad. As per the instructions, we left the bad fortune behind at the Temple, tied to a pole, so that it would change into a blessing. Fingers crossed on that one!!
So that post ended up being longer than I planned! Too much to say about Tokyo, I could go on and on. We have two more days here, then off to explore more of Japan.
Our Family Sabbatical Blog 
3 responses to “Our first international stop – Tokyo Japan”
Love the report! Please keep it up, length and all!
And I loved the proper disposal of vomit…
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following along from AZ, USA! the audience needs pictures of mom. Fiona — we know you’re out there! Make one of those darling boys snap some of you too
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haha, I’ll try!
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