Ah, Japan. The place I’ve wanted to go to ever since discovering the world of anime. What an amazing place, and I’d actually say I enjoyed it the most on  my trip, probably because I had the least expectations for it. I should figure out how to eliminate expectations for everything that I want to do, because it works wonders.

I was pretty delirious from having been awake since morning in London, then getting only a few hours sleep on the plane because I was enjoying the in-flight entertainment too much and its manga feature plus some space pirate movie which was pretty awful, and then spending nearly a full day exploring Tokyo again. (Did I mention there was reindeer meat in the form of a sandwich on the Finnish leg of our flight? There wasn’t much actual meat I think, so I couldn’t taste it at all)

The second day was much better since I’d actually gotten decent sleep, and went to Odaiba, where there was a massive Gundam statue outside that evceryone was taking pictures of. I didn’t realise just how big Gundam is until I learned there are Gundam cafes everywhere (and by everywhere I was aware of two).

Godzilla is also a thing, with a statue sitting happily in the middle of a square.

Our first real part of exploration was the Miraikan, or Future Museum. There were some pretty interesting things going on there, such as a mini petting zoo with lizards, lambs, rabbits, monkeys and a toucan. There was also a poop exhibit that was an “only in Japan” moment for me, however it was classed as a premium exhibit which doubled the cost of an entry ticket, so we didn’t go. Considering I don’t have particular interest in museums, I’m glad I didn’t spend as I pretty much ran out of money at the end of the trip.

The Miraikan is a very cool museum, featuring a nixie tube, a simplified demonstration of how the internet works, a massive revolving earth which had different display settings, stuff, and tardigrades! I was actually impressed that they’d feature such a nigh indestructible creature that’d I’d recently learned about. I think they are the answer to the time-space-end-of-the-universe conundrum (if there even is such a thing), even though they’re not the prettiest things. It was definitely worth a visit.

There was also a mexican festival along one of the main walkways, and I was highly tempted to get shaved ice, but I decided not to. What really surprised me though, was that at the end, I saw what I thought was the statue of liberty! It was an amazing sight and I totally wasn’t expecting it.

It was even prettier at night when the lights went up and she was awash in the glory and brightness. Or something like that.

Wandering around the Diver City complex also lead us to an evening show with a monkey. I wasn’t particularly surprised, though I questioned the simple leash around its neck. That being said, I couldn’t help but think that the monkey was judging us and wondering why we were getting it to do such tedious and simple tasks such as leaping large distances, walking on its hands and jumping around on a pogo stick.

I felt very lucky to have witnessed a traditional Japanese wedding while visiting the Meiji shrine. I don’t think I ever knew exactly what one was like, but it was super cool because there was a Western guy. Yes, that makes it cool for me. Also, I loved the umbrella man. I can’t believe I’ve actually now seen an umbrella man in real life. How epic would it be to say that your job is to hold umbrellas for people!

Hello Harajuku! What a crowded busy street, and what a shame I never actually got to eat a crepe from here. I did decide that I would try some clothes on from here – mainly for the loli/goth factor but it turns out that one size does not fit all! So I gave up on my quest to obtain more obscure clothing. Instead, it was time to hunt for coffee.

So I may or may not hold a few baristas in very high regard, so much so I’d call them my idols. After a bit of twitter stalking, managed to get a few cafes on my list. This one is Nozy Coffee, an espresso based cafe that has a really cool setup – grinders and machines on opposite sides of a large oval-ish bench. It was pretty awesome though I’m not particularly sure about their preference for service espresso in all kinds of different glasses, for example, my brother’s Colombian was served in a flute. It was pretty tasty and they even had “New York Rings” – cronuts! I still preferred the ones from Shanghai though – they were pretty awesome!

What’s Japan without random shriney things from happening!

Of course, we had to visit a cat cafe. There was also an opportunity to visit an owl and parrot cafe, but we decided not to go. So cats it was! They were pretty awesome, and a couple of them kept trying to sniff one of my brother’s cameras – possibly because of how many smells had accumulated on it. Cats seem to be rather cautious of me, not sure why though. Still, they were pretty cute, especially when one went to sit in a glass bowl, another went rampaging on a run around the room, and one was terrified of a toy of the sun. It was also pretty much full of tourists when we visited, rather than locals.

One of the days we were in Tokyo also coincided with a public holiday, so our quest to see some plastic food shops didn’t go as planned. However, we did end up visiting a very cool cafe. This one was called Bridge Cafe, designed by Sturdy Style. They made an amazing Yirgacheffe pourover and had a super tasty espresso too. It was an interesting concept and similar yet different from all the garage cafes in Sydney and Melbourne. They had office spaces at the back and upstairs full of architecture stuff, and they had some pretty interesting magazines too. It wasn’t on the list I’d compiled, but I’d definitely recommend it.

Asakusa is quite old fashioned, in a good way. Full of stalls and people, with a shrine at the end of the street, it was a fun place to walk past and see all the different stores. It’s also a pretty vast place when you’re actually traversing all the side streets too. It was here that I got to eat a curry bread, and also sample some taiyaki!

Street theatre with crossover! How awesome! Even though I had no idea what was going on, it was absolutely hilarious and we even saw Frieza evolve!

What’s a trip to an Asian country without taking pictures of koi!

This was a pretty interesting skyline, with the Skytree and Asahi building side by side. And that weird gold wiggly thing!!

Ah anmitsu, my favourite Japanese dessert! Managed to have some, but I was weirded out by the salted beans because I’ve never had them in Sydney before. I also didn’t realise how much clear, flavourless jelly there’d be, since I’ve only previously had ones with small amounts of jelly. Overall I still enjoyed it, and that mochi! One day I may try and make my own!

The famous tuna auctions. I had a bout of insomnia for the first time ever, which was both annoying and fortuitous as I had a 3:30AM start to line up to view the auctions. I didn’t realise until after we sat down in a little room, that the viewings didn’t start until 5:25! But they only let 120 people view it per day, and at 4AM the second group of 60 people was almost complete. Waiting in line sure was tiresome! Travelling through the busy driveways when it was finally time, was quite an experience of motorised carts whizzing past. We were confined to a small area to watch the auctions, and it was hard to tell what was going on except that several auctioneers would yell at once and they all kind of sang to differentiate themselves.

All the random tuna thawing out ever so slowly and looking sad about it!

After watching the auctions, we lined up at Daiwa Sushi for breakfast. There was already a half hour wait at 6AM in the morning for this place, which is pretty crazy. The food inside was delicious though! Now I know why my brother loves sea urchin, as we had some here and it was so fresh and creamy. The style of food here is “omakase” which is basically the chef’s selection. Good thing it’s my favourite way of being served food! The toro was also amazing and it’s true that Japan is indeed the best place for sushi. Apart from the 7 piece omakase, it was also possible to order a la carte, so my brother had another toro and sea urchin, and I opted for the scallop, of course. It means I can now claim this as the most expensive breakfast I’ve ever had, at about 4800 yen per person.

After breakfast, it was a stroll through Tsukiji fish markets, where there were several speeding cart-things and a lot of bits of fish. There was plenty of tuna, river eels, cephalopods and molluscs – I’ve never seen so much shellfish in my life. Lots of sand crabs and sand lobsters too. I was pretty interested in how they killed the fish too – that needle in the head thing – it’s awesome and supposed to be painless. I really wished that I lived here so that I could take part in buying, preparing and cooking all this wonderful produce!

Apparently this is a thing called the Shibuya scramble? Basically that famous crossing or something. Watching the people go is pretty awesome, especially in the only Starbucks worth going to in Tokyo. Good thing we did, because Asians are awesome at making tasty pudding drinks – the caramel pudding frappuccino was so good!

As our uncle was free, we got the opportunity to visit Mt. Fuji. It wasn’t as far out from the city as I thought, but then again we got lost a few times so I don’t know how long it actually took. Getting lost was also serendipitous because we came across a beautiful shrine. The place was so green from both leaves and moss and so beautiful that I really wished I already had a figurine so I could go taking really cute pictures!

We didn’t manage to pick a particularly great day to go, as there was a lot of fog and cloud, and visibility got really low at times as we were walking around, which in itself was a surreal experience as it felt like we were in our own little bubble world, all quiet and misty. I also finally got to order oden, and this is where I discovered that when I had egg in my soba, it was raw! Since I wasn’t expecting raw egg, I had incorrectly been concluding I had some sort of 62 degree egg and couldn’t figure out where all the white was, and assumed that it had mixed in with the noodles and broth. There was also a gift shop that sold Mt. Fuji air in cans, which was hilarious to see.

What a cute little fortune telling dancing dragon thing! The way it moved actually reminded me of the robot from the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, which I had always wanted to challenge to a dancing competition but never managed to because someone else was always playing with it.

Finally the fog cleared, and we could see the top by the time we’d driven back down. It was also weird since it was summer and therefore not snowcapped, but still distinctive and pretty!

Second last day, and it was time for one last overseas coffee crawl. First stop, Switch Coffee, which was a tiny little shop tucked away in a little residential street, so much so that I was convinced I had the wrong place and that Google was wrong, until I stood in front of the cute little light blue wall. Costa Rica Los Lajas was my filter of choice, while my brother ordered an espresso tonic which was an amazing and delicious concept.

My brother did ask if I knew if any of the cafes on my list served food, and my default response was always to assume there was only coffee sold – and I was correct. So breakfast ended up being at a ramen place, which claimed to be famous for its backfat. What does that mean? You get to choose the level of fat in your broth! This was an amazing idea so I ordered mine with extra fat, and that was delicious.

Next stop, Onibus. Another tiny cute little place with a bright red roaster at the door! Plus you can see the London coffee guide sitting next to one of their grinders, and a coffee poster in the background! This was a really cool place and we were lucky that the barista in the picture here spoke English, so we had a little conversation going and again, what a small world – first the waiter in City Social who used to work at Rockpool, and now a roaster who spent a couple of months in Newtown at a cafe called Papercup! I absolutely love travelling and talking to people for this reason. He let us know that the owner of Onibus had opened up two other places that we could visit – but alas we were out of time! Yet another reason to go back to Japan after this.

I personally loved watching this guy roasting away, and I finally saw the entire process from start to finish. It was fascinating seeing the beans go from green to brown, and that cracking process sounded a lot like popcorn. It’s something I would love to learn more about, but first, I have to start being a barista and learning about coffee.

And here is the other awesome barista who was there making our pourovers.

Oh you delicious and gorgeous looking sauri pike. Oooh yes! Our last day, we may have possibly made a bad decision to attempt to visit Sushi Dai at 8AM in the morning, because we ended up queueing for four hours! The queue was long enough that my brother was able to buy a suitcase, pack the final bits of stuff for our departure, and check out of the hotel. I can’t believe that people would line up for a single sushi store like this, but once you get in, it’s amazing and you forget how long you’ve spent in line. The chefs are super cheery, friendly and polite. We also got there just when a new giant scallop was being opened which was quite the sight! Again, what a delicious set of sushi, some similar, and some different from Daiwa sushi. I loved the sanma and chose scallop as my sushi of choice, and here I also got asked what level of wasabi I preferred, which saved me from wasabi shock. I was very impressed.

If going here, I’d definitely recommend queueing as early as possible; it’s totally worth a two hour wait, but four hours is definitely a stretch!

The last few hours were spent in Akihabara while I agonised over the figurine(s) I should get before I left. I can’t believe that we came here three times in a single trip and there was still more to see! I had to restrain myself and not get everything in sight that was pretty. There was a lot of Fate Zero merchandise that I wanted – and while I really love the show, I didn’t feel I had to buy everything from it. Except that Saber on a Bike figurine. Oh wow that was amazing and I really really really wanted it, but it wouldn’t have fit in my luggage and would have taken the last of my money. Instead, I was super happy in finally getting my hands on a Gilgamesh nendoroid who I can now take along with me for photography cuteness! Yes, I’m going to become one of them.

Other fun things involved sampling “every flavour ice cream,” including basil, sea urchin, eel, crab, roasted tea, miso ramen, and yuzu at Namjatown, and trying out canned ramen from a vending machine. Wow, that was weird! I think they used potato starch noodles to stop it from going mushy and it comes out kind of lukewarm. Probably not going to try that one again!

I definitely have to revisit Japan for the cafes, Yoyogi park (which was closed to due a mosquito related disease outbreak), Skytree (it was so unfortunate that I hadn’t had the time to visit!), the Ghibli museum and a Pokemon centre. And possibly a lot more that I don’t remember. I’d also love to learn some Japanese so I knew what I was doing half the time, but that was actually the charm of this visit. The first day or so was daunting, but after that, I loved being able to do anything and taking a chance at pointing and choosing random things on menus without knowing what it was. The people could also speak enough english that exploration wasn’t prohibitive at all – in fact I saw the appeal in buying things from convenience stores too, because they are so convenient! Plus there are vending machines on every street with all sorts of drinks so it was easy to stay hydrated!

I can’t wait to come back!