I’m not going to bother doing an extensive breakdown of what we did on Day 8 since it was just waking up and going to Narita. Instead I’m just going to skip straight to the travel tips! The most important tips will be at the top, but latter parts of this post I ended up just putting everything I could think of.
If you want to see the photos from Day 8 you can go to my gallery here! Continue reading
Once again I woke up really early this day, so much so that I decided to just go out for a walk in Shibuya and listen to the latest episode of the Idle Thumbs podcast.
If you want to skip straight to the photos go here to my gallery for Day 7! Continue reading
Day 6 was a buffer day I put into our itinerary because I figured we’d be exhausted after all the Kyoto travel, shinkansen etc.
If you want to skip straight to the photos go here to my gallery for Day 6!
We started very early because the deadline for returning our Airbnb keys was 10:00 AM by Kyoto station, and we wanted to go to the Fushimi Inari shrine first thing in the morning
If you want to skip straight to the photos here’s my gallery for Day 5!
Day 4 was our big travel day. We were finally taking the Shinkansen bullet train! We made another stop at the Lawson to get some rice balls and other food for breakfast. Then we took the subway to Shinagawa to get a ticket to Nagoya. I was a little worried about buying shinkansen tickets, but the ticket takers spoke very good English.
If you want to skip straight to the photos, click here for the Day 4 gallery!
Another thing to note about Japan is how QUIET it is in public places like subway trains and the Shinkansen. Of course Japanese people can be loud and rowdy as any other people, but when in shared public spaces they’re generally very respectful of people around them. Continue reading
The first time I went to Tsukiji with Anna we got there around 6:00 AM. This time I didn’t want to rush everyone out the door too early so I said it’d be okay if we left the apartment around 6:30 AM.
If you want to skip straight to photos, go to my Day 3 gallery here!
Well, the IDEA was for it to not be rushed but…
JAPAN TRAVEL TIP: I said this in a previous post, but it bears repeating that you should get your Suica card AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. Suica cards are what you use to take the subway no matter which line you need. You put money on it as needed instead of having to deal with tickets. Since the subway lines are privately owned, the biggest problem with tickets is you have to get ones specific to the subway line. If you get the wrong ticket you can’t go through the turnstile. With a Suica card you just tap, and go through. You buy them from specific Suica card machines that have a black border around them. Continue reading
Day 2 was the “relax day” I put into our schedule because I wanted to give us a day where we didn’t have to be rushing around, getting in long lines or having stressful time constraints.
If you want to skip straight to the photo gallery go here for all my Day 2 photos!
I woke up before everyone else around 3AM so I just lay in bed until everyone was ready to shower up and get ready for the day. I wanted to stay off my phone as much as possible during the trip, but when you’re waiting around doing nothing there aren’t many options. Somehow it didn’t occur to me to turn on the TV and enjoy all the wonders that Japanese TV holds like endless programming about food, weird reaction videos, game shows and anime. Continue reading
Our flight was via United Airlines nonstop from LAX to Narita Airport, leaving at 11:50 AM and arriving 3:00 PM.
(If you want to skip straight to the photos, here’s the album for my photos from Day 1!)
I heard that a method of getting over jetlag faster was to adjust your meals ahead of time so that they’re in-line with the place that you’re going. So I started by eating breakfast during lunch time and so on. I mistakenly started a day early, so I ended up having my meals at odd times for two days before the trip. I thought that it gave the experiment a better chance of succeeding. I’ll cut to the chase and say it didn’t work at all. When I was in Japan I was still waking up around 3 AM or earlier. Though in my normal routine I wake up around 5:30 AM so it wasn’t TOO different.
My ritual for flying is to listen to the Superman Theme during takeoff. Supposedly, the theme song is composed to sync up if you start it at the right moment. I’m always a bit off, but if you start playing it as soon as the airplane engines really kick in then you’ll lift off just as the theme gets going.
I packed my kindle with grand hopes of using the disconnected time to finally read, and maybe finish up some books I’ve been working on but then I realized that airplanes all have tons of entertainment built into them. So I ended up not reading at all and instead watched: Creed, Frozen and Real Steel. Continue reading
I went on my third trip to Japan for about a week in the Summer of 2016.
My first time in Japan was when I was thirteen. My older sister was living there, so I went on a two week trip with my mom.
In 2010 I went with my friend Anna who is native to Japan. She planned out what ended up being an amazing, and jam packed two week trip. You can read all about that trip in my blog posts here.
This trip was different for a number of reasons, because this time around I was the veteran traveling with my friends Mark, Heather and her son JL. Continue reading
I know each blog post has been a retrospective, but I thought I’d put some final thoughts and thank you’s into one post. If anything, it reminds me that we really did everything we blogged about. It seems like a dream at this point, but we really did it thanks in no small part to friends and family on the trip.
This was my second ever trip to Japan. My first was sixteen years ago when I was thirteen. That was a very different experience because I knew very little about Japan, hadn’t traveled outside of the country and I had no idea what to expect. Something I saw a lot of during that trip were more American celebrity advertisements. I think at that time it must’ve been at its peak because it was unavoidable. This time around I only saw half a dozen ads. Continue reading
Derek Lieu 