The Great Dopamine Rush of 2025

What a big day Hannah and I had planned for today. We started our day with a short walk to an incredible Japanese/western fusion breakfast restaurant, called Ivy Place. We shared an smoked salmon avocado toast with Brie and fresh greens, and some yogurt with granola and fresh fruit. It was delicious.

Having Hannah with me, has changed my eating habits a bit. I mean this woman loves a snack. We have been trying so many interesting new snack foods. Today was a snacking day for sure. Between the hours of 7am and and 1pm, we had breakfast, family mart snack sushi, Krispy Kreme donuts, hash browns, udon noodle soup, swirl cake, and a teriyaki chicken burger with a small fries from the tallest McDonalds I have ever seen.

During the middle of this walking snack tour of Shibuya, and Shinjuku we went to a place called Samurai Restaurant Time. Well lets just say we had no clue what we signed up for in the slightest, The whole place was covered in anime titties and fake jewels when we entered. Was it lunch, was it a dance show, music, strippers? Well it wasn’t strippers, but not far off, It ended up being a samurai themed musical theatre performance. And it was loud and exciting and absolutely crazy. Both Hannah and I left the show feeling a little shell shocked. The food they served was ok but nothing to write about.

We checked out piss alley after the show and it was cool but without knowing we had showed up before most of the stalls had opened for the day. At this point we already been walking and eating for 7 hours, both of us were feeling gassed. We had seen a lush store on a previous outing near our hotel, Hannah had the bright idea to get a bubble bar, and have a bubble bath back at the hotel. Now Japan is not really renowned for the size of its bathtubs, or having them at all, but our hotel had an amazing 2 person bath. It was quite rejuvenating in the middle of a big day.

Something that has become Hannah & I’s thing on this trip, Is strawberries. Strawberries in Japan are ludicrously expensive, and insanely good, So on our way back to the hotel for bath time, we found a little market that sold some “golden” strawberries. Gotdamnit, they are so good.

After a little hangout to rest our legs a bit we jumped on a train to go to Teamlabs, It is an interactive multimedia immersive experience. There is multiple Teamlab exhibits in Asia. Borderless is the one we went to, There was no map no explanations, every animation flowed into the next, all the different rooms were hidden and needed to be explored. It was really easy to be confused as to where you were as the floor to ceiling animations changed over time, making it really hard to set mental waypoints. There were so many different rooms and experiences, I think Hannah an I’s favorite was Infinite Expanse. The room was filled with floor to ceiling Led Diodes set up in a grid pattern, thousands of strings of LEDs all changing designs and effects synchronized to music. It was utterly breathtaking.

From Teamlabs we tried to go to a popular conveyor belt sushi restaurant. It took us ages to actually find it, Google maps decided to be useless in our hunt for this one. After finding it we made the realization that Japan is unlike Canada, People wait hours for seats in good restaurants. The waiting queue, was 53 tables strong with a minimum wait of 115 minutes. We had been busy all day and hadn’t eaten anything since about 1, Hannah had had it with not being fed in that moment. We Bailed on sushi and got a seat in the closest restaurant that served pasta we could find. To be honest there was no way I was going to wait for over 2 hours for food. Thankfully most restaurants here are in kind of upscale food courts, so getting a different decent place to eat was easy.

Both Hannah & I had pasta, meatballs and a limoncello soda. The food was decent, not the best Italian Id ever eaten, but what do you expect in Tokyo. At this point we were nuked, we ended up walking close to 24 kilometers throughout the day. It was a big day, We hit up a family mart on the way back to the hotel for our third round of Japanese snacks of the day. I found Spam Masubi, prepacked ready to eat. It was one of the weirdest things I’ve eaten, but also so delicious that I almost went and bought another one. Hannah has become very fond of snack sushi rolls, where you unwrap the rice and filling and the nori at the same time then freshly wrap the rice in the nori. They are pretty darn tootin. I think we have amassed about 12 different random bags of candy at this point from several trips to convenience stores around Tokyo.

After getting back I booked us some train tickets and got our next hotel room in Kyoto. Then we both fell straight asleep.

Till tomorrow