Week 25 - Tokyo

Tokyoooo, the biggest city in the world! We are excited and throw ourselves into the hustle and bustle. Tokyo is huge, Tokyo is great, but Tokyo is really just about eating and shopping. We had five full days there, which was a perfect amount of time to see the famous districts, try lots of restaurants and shop for souvenirs at Don Quijote. Special shoutout to the Don Quijote store, which everyone who has ever been to Japan knows. A chain where every store is several stories high and no one is safe from the colorful stuff, loud exhausting music, human chaos and all kinds of smells. To see everything, you inevitably spend hours in there and even the person with the strongest nerves will be overwhelmed by all the stimuli in this store within 5 minutes. But everything is tax free for tourists here. Hence the hype. And there is just everything. Sweets, food, drugstore products, various merchandise for all the characters I don't know, suitcases (Esther's Paradise), stuffed animals and much more!! The size of the city is particularly noticeable because you can take the metro in a star shape for 2 hours in any direction and still be in the center. That's really cool and I've never experienced anything like it before. Our hostel was a bit away from the tourist areas, but it was also really nice in its super cute neighborhood. There's a small 7-eleven in front of the door, where the hostel provides the following slippers. We printed out your postcards there. We also came across the amazing 7-eleven smoothies there. You buy a plastic cup with frozen fruit in it, pay for it and then scan it on the smoothie maker and get a fresh juice (the best was strawberry-banana soy milk). So we quickly got into a routine and every day we took the Tobu-Tojo Line to Ikebukuro and from there to the respective districts: Shibuya (to the confusing intersection where everyone is walking back and forth, and shopping), Shinjuku (eating a lot, one thing next to the other, we also went to the cinema here and watched Dune 2, the cinema snack was a giant churro and a crepe with ice cream and cream in it?, but the whole cinema stank of caramel popcorn, memories of Artbox in Korea immediately come back), Ginza (street food fish market, tried wagyu sushi and raw shrimp, ten-story Uniqlo madness) etc...Our very last day was actually our first chill day of the whole trip and unfortunately also the day I finally got sick (worst timing ever).

Esther left me early the next morning to start her journey halfway around the world. I then moved into a hostel near the airport so that I could hop on my plane the next day in a relaxed manner. Unfortunately, my cold was getting worse and my new nasal douche didn't help much. Despite this, I got to the airport on time the next day, completely exhausted, and had already got in line at the check-in desk when I started to panic more and more about the pressure in my ears. Because if you have very strong pressure in your ears on the ground, a 10-hour flight might not be a good idea after all. In a panic, I then went to a drugstore to look for nasal spray (name: Drug Box, it was exactly that big). While I was paying for the ultra nasal spray with steroids, there was suddenly an earthquake. Huh. Weird day! In the end, nothing really worked and I listened to my bad gut feeling and didn't get on the plane. Of course, I hadn't booked a flexi option, so €400 wasted. Since everyone at home was asleep at that point, it was all pretty emotional. I sat down at the airport to google alternative flights and accommodation. This also turned out to be more complicated than I thought. Since the cherry blossom season (Sakura Season) is about to begin, accommodation and flight prices in Japan are skyrocketing. So I didn't have much choice of the better-rated hostels and then there were trains cancelled because of the earthquake. I was really stuck! I treated myself to a night in Tokyo and found a nice hostel in an area I didn't know yet. Then I wanted to book a hostel nearby and it was suddenly fully booked. The places here are going like hotcakes and I almost had a nervous breakdown at that point. I then found a hostel in Nikko for three nights, which is also a popular place for tourists. Phew, I think that was the most nerve-wracking day of my whole trip so far!