I’ve booked an intense amount of hotels over the past few months, and so Booking.com rewarded me with a free taxi from the airport to our hotel in Tokyo. I was delighted to accept that, especially since I know how much that would cost to book on my own. We had a relaxing trip from Narita to our first accommodation for our week in Japan.
Luke wanted to book a ryokan – traditional Japanese style lodging – in which you sleep on a futon on the tatami-mat covered floor. The Edo Sakura was exceptionally-well reviewed and available for 3 nights, so we booked it.
After settling in to our hotel, we set out for Akihabra. Akihabra is the neighborhood of stuff. Seriously. Looking for a specific power cord for that thing you have? Akihabra has a store that sells only power cords. Looking for an obscure DVD or a replacement part for your camera? No problem – go to Akihabra.
Akihabra also has gashapon galore, and we certainly took advantage of the opportunity to add a few more fun little items to our collections. I have no idea why these are so fascinating to adults, but they are. In fact, I would say these machines are patronized primarily by adults – rarely by children.
After an izakaya dinner (Japanese small plates, sort of like tapas), we headed off to bed. It took me a few minutes to get used to sleeping on the floor and on a thinner futon, but once I was asleep, I stayed asleep. I did not wake up once during the night, and I woke up feeling quite refreshed.
We spent Wednesday in Nikko, a town about 70 miles northwest of Tokyo. I wanted to get out of the city a bit because Japan is a country of striking opposites. In Tokyo, it is all bright lights, tall buildings, crowds, and all the other trappings of a major metropolitan area. Once you board a train departing the city, however, things change quickly. Buildings get shorter, green space starts to appear, and soon, you are surrounded by farmland and rice fields with barely an other people in sight.
Nikko is a World Heritage site, filled with elaborate and ancient shrines and temples. After getting off the train and buying tickets for the local bus that goes around the tourist circuit, we grabbed some lunch and then set out to see the sights.
These shrines were wildly elaborate. Japan traditionally favored simple and even austere, so these stand out as exceptionally different. They were set in a forested area which is also unusual in Japan. It was a little hard to fully feel the magnificence and somberness of the area given the insane number of elementary school groups there, but I could see how on a quiet day, the space would nurture reflection and serious thought.
Vacation Days 