Tokyo was soooo much fun! This was our first time visiting Japan, so we were super excited! We had a 7 day window for travel, so we wanted to take full advantage of our time away to experience as much as we could. After doing a little research on Tokyo, we made a list of what we each wanted to do/see.
Travelling, for us, is about a few things. Of course we like seeing new places, but we like to see how other people live, what they eat and what they like to do. When you interact with people outside of your “bubble”, you realize that we are similar, but we are very different! I know that sounds cliche, but it’s the truth. For instance, growing up we would occasionally have tacos for dinner. I mean, lots of families make tacos for dinner, but ours were a little different. My mother would fry flour tortilla shells to make them crunchy. This was normal to me because it was all I knew, but later in life I realized that the way we made tacos was different than the way other people/families made tacos. Travel for me is about watching other families make tacos…lol.
Ok, so back to that list of things that we wanted to experience. Food was number one on the list! We LOVE sushi, so you know we had to try sushi in Japan (one of the places that it originated from) and we had to try ramen….not cup-o-noodles, but actual ramen. We wanted to see a sumo wrestling match, ride a rickshaw, see some ninjas, check out some comic books stores, see robots, but the thing we wanted to do most was ride go-karts through the city dressed like Mario characters…lol. We had a long list, but this is how it actually went down:
We arrived and checked into our hotel. We stayed in Roppongi, which is a tourist-friendly area known mostly for it’s nightlife. Once we got settled in our room, we changed and ventured out to explore the area. There were tons of restaurants in the neighborhood…most of which were not Japanese restaurants, so we had to search for a legit sushi spot. We found one and sat at the sushi bar. Our Chef was very entertaining and he spoke English. (sidenote: I don’t know about the rest of Japan, but Tokyo is very American friendly). Most restaurants have English menus so you know what you are ordering. The sushi was a little expensive…about $3 per piece of Nigiri (rice ball with fresh fish on top) or $6 per Maki roll. At home I usually order tempura or maki rolls, so Nigiri rolls were a little out of my comfort zone, but these were sooo good! You could definitely taste the freshness and none of the fish tasted fishy. I never thought I would eat raw fish and like it, but I did.
We set out to explore the Tsukiji Fish Market and Akihabara! The Tsukiji Fish Market is one of the largest seafood markets in the world and Akihabara is an area in central Tokyo mostly known for electronics.
We took some pictures as we passed by a Buddhist temple on the way to Tsukiji Fish Market:
Once we got to the fish market, we checked out the food stalls and grabbed some lunch:
Then we headed over to Akihabara. We checked out a few electronic stores, comic book stores and game centers. There was even a 5 story Sega store that had VR games. We kept seeing fish shaped pastries, so we tried those too. They were basically fish shaped waffles with pudding filling. I didn’t really like those:
We went to Asakusa and Shinjuku. We didn’t really have any plans for Asakusa, except to try to find some Ramen and do some shopping for souvenirs. We knew that the Sensoji Temple was in Asakusa so we visited it and took a rickshaw tour. We went to Shinjuku for dinner and a show at the Robot Restaurant:
We were on a mission to find the Unicorn Gundam statue at Diver City Tokyo Plaza which is basically a 7 level mall. I had no idea what it was, but Daren explained it to me. After visiting the mall and watching the Unicorn Gundam transform, we headed over to Shibuya for dinner at an oyster restaurant and then to Harajuku for desert crepes:
This was our last day. We stopped by the Tsukiji Fish Market one last time to try some more delicious seafood. We were a little disappointed, because there were not as many food stalls open as there were the first time. We asked around and were told that Sundays are the best days to go to the market, so if you go, you want to go on a Sunday! I was excited to try these shrimp filled dumplings that I couldn’t find the first time we went…they were delcious!
After we grabbed a bite to eat, we were ready for our MariCAR gokart tour. This tour was one of the main reasons we wanted to visit Tokyo. We had a blast driving through the city! If you decide to go and you want a discount, as for Pablo and tell him that the DeLongs sent you!
Once we finished our MariCar tour we went on a quest to find some ramen. We found quite a few shops that sold it, but they only had beef or pork ramen, but we don’t eat beef or pork. We finally found a chicken ramen restaurant and we were not dissappointed! It was neat because you place your order from a vending machine then the chef brings it out to you.
This was a pretty long post, so thank you for reading down this far. I hope you enjoyed the highlights of our trip. Let us know what you think!
5 days in Tokyo Tokyo was soooo much fun! This was our first time visiting Japan, so we were super excited!
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