The Great Dopamine Rush of 2025

Day 40 – The Best For Last

The last day of our trip started with naught a cloud in the sky. We went up to the lounge for breakfast, Hannah and Is favorite breakfast this trip was by far soft scrambled eggs on rice. The Hilton did not disappoint us on this front. As we ate our breakfast on the 37th floor we looked out longingly to Mt Fuji, and its snow covered beauty. We intended on going there, but it never made sense with the rest of our plans. Today we decided to go to the Warner Bros Studio Japan to see the the Harry Potter exhibit there.

The view of Mt Fuji from the lounge over Tokyo.

After a 30 minute train ride we arrived at the studio. Hannah and I are both pretty nerdy about Harry Potter, so even though I had little expectation that the tour was going to be worth the $80 entrance fee per person we were excited.

From the moment we walked from the bright sunshine outside into the studio, my expectation of it not being that great was blown out of the water completely. Everywhere around us were grown ass adults, fully decked out in wizarding ropes and costumes from the movies. I mean 3 out of 5 people where dressed up. Immediately feeling underdressed, we hit up the absolutely massive store at the entrance and got ourselves decked out in our house colors.

Flying books in the bookstore.
The great hall, these are all the real sets used in the films.
It was really cool being in the sets.
Hannah’s head of house. Cant believe she’s a Slytherin.
The moving staircase. In all the films they used this one mechanized prop to do the moving staircase shots with the help of green screen.
The Gryffindor common room.
The Slytherin common room
The Goblet of Fire.
The practice dummy from The Order Of The Phoenix.
The queen from wizards chess.
Death Eater masks. Hannah loved these.
Typical Slytherin loving the dark ones.
Centaurs from the Forbidden Forest.
In the freezing cold wind at Hagrid’s hut.
A typical Slytherin meal, of bangers and mash with roast veggies and gravy. This was actually so delicious, both of us were impressed with how good the food was.
The Hogwarts Express. At least a replica.
Hannah becoming blurry as she’s about to get sucked up the fireplace.
The Ministry of Magic set was really cool. I particularly enjoyed it.
Just some Daily Prophets, I had to fight the urge to take one of these.
Diagon Alley as seen in the 6th film.
The original model of the castle used in the films. This photo does it no justice, this thing is the size of a house. Like 40ft by 40ft, all built by hand.

Now I could write a 3 page essay on our trip to the Warner Bros Studio, but I’m not. To sum it up it was one of the coolest experiences Hannah or I had ever done ever. Especially with all the people including ourselves dressed up, It was quite magical. It however proved a point that Hannah has been trying to shove down my throat the whole time we were here. I am a nerd, correction both of us are nerds.

After a few hours of chilling in the room recovering from our 5 hour studio tour, Hans and I went and helped ourselves to some more canapes and bottomless champagne in the lounge. Ill miss that lounge, the views were stunning. It was a great place to get loaded up on champagne before hitting the town and going bar hopping at the Golden Gai.

From the hotel we walked the 20 minutes to Golden Gai through downtown Shinjuku. What a place it is, there is like 10 cross walks at this one intersection. Golden Gai is a few small streets of teeny tiny bars that seat between 4 and 8 people. It was quite the place.

Hannah with her hot chocolate trying to stay warm in the icy breeze of nighttime Shinjuku.

We had an absolute riot at Golden Gai, we went to two bars. The first was a super fancy spirit bar where we had an amazing vodka cran. The second was a sake bar, at the second bar we met 2 other small groups of travelers. We stayed there for hours. After 3 giant bottles of sake had been drunk dry by our new friends and us, we parted as a much larger group of ten. From there we went into downtown Shinjuku to a karaoke bar and proceeded to terribly sing every song we could think of from our younger years. From karaoke things got hazy for a while, I came back to reality at another bar, some 2 hours had past. This was such a fun night. We said goodbye to our new friends and got a taxi back to the hotel.

Hannah belting out the words to what I guess was one of her favorite terrible pop songs.

Till tomorrow.

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Devin Van Hierden

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