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 roomThe 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.
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.
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.
Welp, I really have been slacking on writing. Its wild how much doing this exercise of writing down a chronicle of my life on this trip has actually helped bring a lot of calmness and peace to me. The last 3 days have been an absolute whirlwind.
My flight from Bali to Japan was a doozy, I traveled all damn day. When I finally arrived at my hotel, 15 hours had passed and my wallet was $36560 Yen Lighter. For those who don’t know the conversion, that’s $365.60 Cad. I was very tired and used to just taking airport cabs all over SEA for basically nothing. Well Japan is not SEA, its Japan, and cabs are f%#king expensive here. I was livid at myself and starving when I arrived at my hotel. That night I had vending machine peanuts and a sweet waffle for dinner, probably my cheapest meal ill have here in Japan.
The next morning I awoke with a bunch of hours to kill, while i was waiting for Hannah to arrive from Canada. Oh I forgot to mention, I booked the wrong airport hotel. Instead of being at Haneda Int, where I landed, it was at Narita Int. where Hannah was landing today. Hence the 1 hour $365 cab ride. All I could say about that f%#kup, was “IDIOT”. Any who, I had some time to kill and wanted Hannah’s entry into the city to go smoothly, so I figured out the train passes and caught a train into Narita city to go have a walk about and some lunch. On the train I met a sweet elderly Japanese man who spoke flawless English, he suggested that I go visit a nearby temple and try a local specialty dish of BBQ eel. Well the temple was incredible and every restaurant I passed had BBQ eel on the menu. After the temple I found myself in a city park that was incredibly manicured and gorgeous, even in the dead of winter. It was a serene place to sit and enjoy nature, the park was in a hollow and basically all city sounds were completely drowned out. It was almost silent. After walking back from the park, I found a restaurant that was full but didn’t have a 50 person line down the street. There is a reason Narita is famous for this dish, It was stellar. Much better than any eel I’ve eaten before.
After killing a bunch of hours in town I went and picked up Hannah from the airport. What a reunion that was, you would think we had been apart for a year. We loaded up and jumped on the skyliner train to Tokyo. The train systems here are incredible. After a smooth 1.5 hour ride with a single train change, and a small kafuffle with maps. We landed at our absolutely sick penthouse suite in a small hotel, just a block from the famous Shibuya scramble intersection. What a spot! after a quick unpack we headed to a local sushi bar to try Japanese sushi. Well we were a little surprised, to say the least. It is not like back home, in the slightest. It was fool hardy to think so. Some of the dishes we thought we knew, were so vastly different in flavor that we didn’t like them. It was really good but kind of weird. And sushi is very expensive in Japan. Like way more than back home, but you know that’s all part of the fun of traveling. We were both bagged from travel and it was sorta late, so after dinner we basically just hit the hay.
This morning, Hannah was up at the crack of dawn. To be expected when your brain and body don’t understand why they are sleeping in the middle of the day, but it is actually 5 am. So we got up and went for an early morning walk around Shibuya before the vast crowds of Japanese locals flooded the streets. The intersection does not look very daunting when there is nobody in it. We have yet to see it in all its glory. On our walk we stopped at a 7eleven and got a pork katsu sandwich to share with a warmed bottle of green tea. 7eleven is shockingly good here in Japan.
after a brief planning session at the hotel, we traveled a stop down the YR line to Harajuku station. What a cluster f%3k that area is, especially when today was a national holiday and there was parades and protests. The area is known for all kinds of clothes shopping, restaurants, and of course Harajuku girls. The shopping was really cool but nothing in Japan will ever be my size, so I was mostly just exploring. Hannah on the other hand, was like a squirrel in a nut factory. She showed some pretty damn good willpower on a few very expensive items. After an hour of exploring we found a very popular ramen place, with an oddly fast moving line to get in. Well Ichiran Ramen is a ramen bar where they serve 2 dishes (regular & deluxe) and you order and pay from a vending type machine at the entrance. That place was efficient, no servers, just a line of bars with a little door at the back of each bar spot. After you sat down a person behind the doors takes your card, and a few minutes later. A delicious bowl of ramen arrives, Hannah and I were blown away. For $30 Cad we were both stuffed and satisfied.
From lunch we continued out wander and accidently came face to face with a large protest, and an even larger contingent of Tokyo police. Nothing violent happened but there was some obvious unrest in the crown of people around the intersection, as the protest marched past. It was wild. Hannah was a little shook. From there we wandered into the tourist trap potion of Harajuku, now at this point it was like 2 pm and people we out. It was mayhem trying to get down the little alleys stuffed with people. It was very overstimulating. When we escaped that craziness we walked to the Shin shrine just on the other side of the train line from the crazy alley area. It was busy but very peaceful. So at this point we had walked like 18km and we were both beat so we hopped on the train to have a chill at the hotel for a bit.
A few hours later, fully rested we set off on a train ride across the city to go up the Tokyo Tower. Now me being the most thoughtful boyfriend in the world, completely blanked that Hannah is terrified of heights. The tower is a replica of the Eiffel tower or just very familiar. Its bloody tall. Well she did great and we went up the tower to gaze over Tokyo. It was not her favorite thing. On our way down to find a restaurant for dinner, our noses directed us to a crepe stand at the base of the tower. We had some delicious savory crepes for dinner, the Japanese have crepes dialed. I had a chicken, curry and cream cheese crepe. Hannah had a chicken teriyaki crepe with mayo. Both were stellar, its not were we intended to eat but it was delicious.
All in, it was a busy day. I cant wait for tomorrow. We are going to Team labs.
The Great Dopamine Rush of 2025 