TacoCat’s Travels #112 (Japan 5.0: Tokyo): Jetting Off with the Fam 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦

May 2021 · 7 min read · Shibuya

Hey Hive!

If you missed last week's post, we had a very relaxing stroll through Ohori Park and fawned over quite a few doggos while enjoying a last beautiful sunset in Fukuoka!

The next day, we had an early flight back home so we had to get back and take off early the next day! And that was it for our Fukuoka trip! It was a pretty cool trip overall and we really enjoyed it!

* * *

After our college semester ended, my mum suggested that we go to Japan together with her sisters and my cousins since they've never been before, while my mum has only been to Osaka once. And since Sean is the resident Japan tour guide, mum figured it would be fun if all of us went together and Sean showed them around.

I've only ever been to Tokyo twice with Sean; once in December 2015, and the other time was when we went for a short student-led exchange program at Keio University in early August 2016.

Sean and I aren't really fans of traveling in December, especially before Christmas, but my relatives had Christmas plans so we didn't have much of a choice unfortunately. So Sean and I had to go into full research mode, looking up flights and accommodations. It was easy when it's just the 2 of us, but with a group of 8 we had to think of a lot more stuff and basically became tour guides.

15 December 2017. Friday.

Anyway, my relatives live in Malaysia while we were in Singapore so we had to arrange our flights such that we'd land around the same time. But the problem was if there were any flight delays.

Our flight was scheduled around 10pm so we headed to the airport around 8pm. And I had a matching outfit with my suitcase! I bought a new We Bare Bears luggage cover and it matched Sean's Christmas present for me which was a Ice Bear t-shirt! Ice Bear is my favourite character in the show and I thought this shirt was so cute!

Now that my mum was with us we could actually take some better photos of the two of us!

It was pretty crowded since it was peak travel season so we had to wait a bit to even check-in. But in the meantime, we had fun taking photos!

Sean and I were sporting our brand new BOSE noise-cancelling headphones that we just got too! Just in time for a flight with families and kids.

Sean was also sporting some brand new shoes from Skechers! It matched his headphones too!

My mum was sitting in Premium Economy so she could go ahead to her seat first. Sean and I were sitting together of course, and we always made it a point to seat last so we don't have to be confined on the plane longer than we have to.

But soon enough, we found our way to our seats!

Also we were flying Scoot and our flight was a transit flight so we had a stopover in Ho Chi Minh for a bit, and we met Ronald Mcdonald!

Thankfully our layover wasn't that long; we barely had enough time to walk to our gate.

But we spent the night on the plane and arrived in Tokyo in the morning safe and sound! Unfortunately, we got caught up with our hotel stuff and getting everyone settled in that I totally forgot to take any photos! We also had to fumble around getting everyone's SIM cards and stuff to make sure we all had cellular data and could communicate with each other in case anyone gets lost.

16 December 2017. Saturday.

We were all getting hungry after settling into our hotel so we went to get lunch at one of our favourite places - Tendon Tenya!

I bought my usual tempura don and a small bowl of soba, while Sean got a bowl of udon to go with his tendon!

It was delicious! We also ordered different sets for my relatives before our food arrived.

We're so glad everyone enjoyed their food! With full bellies, we went ahead with exploring! Our hotel was located in Akihabara, which was perfect since there are a ton of shops, restaurants and entertainment options around!

We just walked along the street and found the Razer store here too!

We even brought them to Donki Hote and showed them the wonders of Donki which included this super huge bag of caramel corn!

We just walked around for some time and showing them all the shops where they could buy stuff. My cousins and uncle are also really into electronics so we showed them to Bic Camera and a bunch of other electronic shops.

Then we were getting a little tired so we headed back to the hotel and rested up for a bit since none of us could really get some rest on the plane. But unfortunately, I took too long of a break and ended up sleeping until dinnertime! Woops! Everyone ended up waiting on me to get dinner. :x

We were all pretty hungry so we headed to the first place we could find that was empty enough to fit 8 people. The problem with Akihabara restaurants is that most of them (at least those on the street) are pretty small. And since it was December it was pretty crowded too.

But we found this small curry restaurant and decided to give it a try! They had a bunch of curry dishes so we tried curry udon and curry rice! It was pretty average I would say, but at least it satisfied all the hangry people. My uncle was getting kinda prissy not getting food so I was glad he was appeased.

We walked around for a bit looking at department stores and I showed my mum the super expensive strawberries they have here since she's probably the only one I know who might buy this.

Then we brought them to Shibuya to visit the famous Shibuya crossing!

And expected, it was super crowded!

But they wanted to take a picture with Hachiko of course.

I think this was at Shibuya station but there was a ton of gacha machines there and my cousins played a couple of them.

We walked around trying to avoid the crowds, but it was practically impossible in December, in Shibuya. So after a couple more photos we headed back to Akihabara, and found the Square Enix Cafe!

The rest of them got tired pretty quickly after that, so they headed back while Sean and I walked around and found our favourite convenience store with our favourite bakery!

Only a couple of special Daily Yamazakis have a bakery section, indicated by the Daily Hot on the signboard, and they have the absolute best breakfast bread!

They didn't have it at 10pm at night obviously, but at least we knew that this was here and it wasn't too far from our hotel so our next day's breakfast was definitely going to be this!

And I think that's going to be it for today! Tune in next week to see what this special bread is and what else we get up to!

Thanks so much for reading!