The Great Dopamine Rush of 2025

Hannah and I were up early to leave Hiroshima, we grabbed a quick hotel breakfast and caught a cab to the train. Side note, cabs in Japan are extremely cheap for short journeys, but extremely expensive for long ones. So weird. The train from Hiroshima to Tokyo takes about 4 hours, Hannah and I both made good progress in our books.

At this point the train system in Japan is really starting to make sense, I am very jealous we don’t have such an Intricate and functional system back home in Canada. After the 4 hour shinkansen train to Tokyo station, we caught a subway to Shinjuku. Now this was the only stay we booked where it wasn’t really that great of a location. The Hilton Tokyo is kind of off in a corner in Shinjuku, so its about a 10 minute walk to get into the more lively area.

So as this was our last stay of the trip we went all out with the hotel and booked a junior suite at the Hilton. Now we did not realize, that all suites come with access to the Hilton executive lounge on the 37th floor. That’s complimentary breakfast everyday, as well as canapes and open bar every night.

Very nearly as we arrived in Tokyo, Hannah was feeling off. We had tried another 711 sandwich of fried egg and teriyaki chicken on the train, but it did not sit well with her. After we tried to eat lunch she was full blown food poisoning. Kind of a bummer for our second to last day to spend it in bed. I am quite a restless person so with Hannah tucked in bed with some room service and a movie I set out to explore a bit in Shinjuku and maybe try Pachinko again.

My first experience with pachinko was such a riot, I think that’s what made my second venture into the game doubly abysmal. I lost $40 in like 15 minutes. I have an addictive personality, because of that I set limits on gambling if i ever try it so my plan to kill time was a complete failure. From the crowded insanely over stimulating pachinko parlor, I set off to try and find a particular convenience store favorite of Hannah’s, the rare salmon maki. We found this snack by means of a TikTok video Hannah had watched some weeks earlier. After successfully finding it on our first forage in Tokyo, She has looked for them in every Family Mart, 711, or Lawson that we have passed. Its funny when you are actively not trying to find something its always there, but as soon as you start looking for it, its nowhere to be found. I think I hit 9 different convenience stores on my way back to the hotel with no luck at all. this however did kill another hour. With Hannah having slept for a few hours she was feeling a lot better when I got back.

When she was feeling fit enough to get out of the hotel, which was only a few hours after being violently ill. I am pretty proud of her for rallying so quickly. We set off for the executive lounge with its bottomless champagne and canapes. We met a couple from Guam while we were sitting in the lounge and proceeded to chat with them for a couple of hours whilst getting nice and tipsy. When the lounge closed we decided to head down to the sushi restaurant in the hotel. We did not check the price of this restaurant, before we got a table. My goodness, we ordered 6 pieces of nigiri and 6 pieces of sashimi and 2 glasses of champagne. It was incredibly good sushi, but the price of $200 for that was definitely steep. All in all it was a pretty good day.

Till tomorrow.