Hello there. Good to see you again. It’s me… Kyle: son of my mother who writes these posts in a loving and motherly way and world-renown blogger.
It’s time for round 2. You know the drill, Bill.
So, It turns out that the weather was really bad in Osaka and our ship needed to refuel, so we had one more day in Tokyo. Yay?! We actually really wanted to go to Osaka since there are some wicked cool Buddhist temples there and whatnot… but of all the stops to get put at twice, Tokyo would definitely be at the top. This time we went out at a more reasonable time and only spent a couple of hours in the city (since our previous day’s excursion was so massive and we were all really tired). We were determined to go to a few of the shopping malls in some of the train stations and visit one of the shrines in the middle of the city. Did we end up doing any of these things? Well, you’re here and listening to me (which I greatly appreciate) so you’re about to find out.

We hopped on the train and got blasted with even more terrifying ads before landing at our first stop, which was one of the train station marketplaces. It took us a bit of time to find the market since the signs were all in Japanese (and were just a weeeeeee bit misleading), but eventually we found it underneath the train station.
Unfortunately we didn’t get a large-scale photo of just what the market looked like (mostly because we were tired and it was difficult to take any photos down there with all of the people) but believe me, the amount of shops and things to do down there was staggering. Each of the subway tunnels moving people in-between the different tracks were heavily populated with knick-knack stores, restaurants, and other fun places for us to poke our heads into. Needless to say, we hung out here for a couple of hours.




Mom and Fred went to a convenient chair massage place and Kayla and I went around to explore on our own terms (I.E do all the nerdy stuff). We found a store with a lot of cute kawaii bear merchandise, a Pokemon store, a store dedicated to Snoopy from the Peanuts(?), and our favorite… a Studio Ghibli store. If you don’t know what Studio Ghibli is, it’s a really popular and high-quality Japanese animation studio. They’ve made films like My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away. I’m a little bit disappointed because we don’t have any photos for the store itself (that might be my fault because I was responsible for pictures), but it was really lovely store. All of the shelves were made of wood and there were tons of really intricately designed statues and leaves to help create a very mystical atmosphere (like you were standing in one of the film’s worlds). We ended up getting Kayla two Studio Ghibli art books for her birthday which she absolutely adores.
SUSHI was next on our list! We were really hungry by this point in the day, so we dropped Freddy off at a conveniently-placed Starbucks (since he can’t stand to be around seafood). Afterwards we moved into food mode and began scouring for the best sushi joint in the whole marketplace. There were so many to choose from, but we finally settled on what was called a Sushi Go-Round.

The Sushi Go-Round was super cool for a multitude of reasons. Our server brought us over to our own individual booth where we were met with an incredibly strange sight:



The sushi was fantastic. It was probably the best sushi experience I’ve ever had (and we know some top-quality sushi restaurants back at home) so it was a pleasant surprise. I guess Japan lives up to the hype when it comes to sushi (that could have just been that restaurant though. It’s hard to determine with only one restaurant to refer to, you know)? After being sufficiently fed and entertained we regrouped with Freddy and headed out to the shrine that was closest to our train station (maybe a few stops over).









Surprisingly, the shrine didn’t really offer a whole ton of things for us to see or do. By this point we were worn out from all of the walking and decided that we had done all we had wanted to do for the day, so we hung out for roughly 10 minutes and then took a train back to the port to get back on the ship.

And thaaaaaaat’s Tokyo. We really enjoyed our time here and I think we’re going to go out of our way to come back here sometime. If you ever get a chance to go to Tokyo, I highly recommend it. The food is great, there’s a ton of stuff to do, and the people are super polite and respectful of the people around them.
*sniff* I’m going to miss you Japan.
Thanks for reading, yo. We’ll see if Mom makes the mistake of letting me write more of these. See ya!
-Kyle
Really interesting. Thanks, Kyle – fun to follow your family’s adventures! I tell you, I could taste that sushi and was salivating, it looked so good and your descriptions were so great (and funny)! Glad you guys are having fun – hope the weather clears up. Sounds like Fred is feeling better. Love and hugs to all!