Happy new year, Tokyo!

After returning from our Thailand and Vietnam trip, T and I realized that many of our friends would be away over the Christmas and New Year season. Since it was our first time being away from family during New Years, we decided to do something fun with it, so we packed our bags once again and jumped on a night bus to Tokyo! You may be wondering why we didn’t hop on the world famous Shinkansen (bullet train), and the reason is because it costs about $150CAD each way, per person. It’s fast, but you have to pay a premium for that kind of service! In contrast, night buses only cost about $60CAD each way. It’s not the most comfortable ride, but you can pretty much just knock out during the 8 hour-long ride and feel moderately rested when you arrive at your destination.

While in Tokyo, we mostly just enjoyed walking around the city, planning one stop per day and exploring for the rest of it. We reunited with some Torontonian friends of ours for dinner, explored Yokohama Chinatown, and even did some shopping on New Year’s Day. In Japan, it’s a tradition for many stores to sell “lucky bags” during the New Year. Stores will fill opaque bags with random items from the store and sell them for a flat price. The contents of the bag are usually worth many times what the paid price is. Our main goal was actually to nab a bag from Tokyo’s most famous Pokemon Centre, but even after arriving about 3 hours before the store’s opening time, we were nowhere near close enough in line to grab a bag. If I had to guess, I’d say we were around 400th in the queue, and only about 200 bags were to be given out. We later found out that some people camp out the night before just to secure their spot! I’d be lying if I told you we weren’t really disappointed, but it’s just merchandise at the end of the day, and life goes on.

We also got to hang out with a Japanese friend of ours whom we had actually met the year before while on our honeymoon! It was interesting meeting with her again, since this time around we ended up speaking more Japanese than English! She admitted to us that over the past year, her English studies hadn’t kept up and was starting to lose it, but luckily my Japanese had improved, and this was a great way to see how far I’d come.

For the remainder of the trip, we focused on eating good food and checking out cool spots for photos, like the Tokyo Forum, pictured near the bottom of this page (big glass building with cool walkways). I think one of the coolest things about this trip was that as we walked around the city, we actually recognized some of the places that had been new and foreign to us just one year before. We realized that Japan was becoming our new home – the feelings of wonder and awe that we felt while touring a new place were gone, but were replaced by a deeper appreciation and understanding of the culture, history, and architecture of the city.