The departure

The departure from Copenhagen

That's it, I'm finally taking my summer holidays! (Just a bit late...)

I'm leaving home on Saturday morning around 8:30, with a single backpack weighing around 10kg, that contains nearly everything I'll need over the next 8 weeks: my tent, around a week's worth of clothes (quite diverse because I'll go through 3 seasons during my trip), electronics and toiletries.

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My bag is a bit too large to be accepted as a carry-on luggage, but I also have a small foldable bag that allows me to transfer whatever I need for the plane (computer, reader, noise cancelling headphones, sleeping pad, batteries) and have it as a personal item. That allows me to carry a single backpack most of the time, but still be flexible when necessary.

The weather in Copenhagen is terrible: rain, cold and strong gusts of wind... I'm glad that I'm leaving now.

At the airport, I meet up with Nico by pure coincidence, he's going to a conference in Dubrovnik and, like me, came too early (my plane is scheduled for 12:45, so I have nearly 3 hours to wait...). We are able to pass time just chatting about life, before going to our respective trips.

Security went through with no wait at all, but due to the bad weather, the plane is delayed, by about an hour... So I use that time to read, I'm done with book 1 of The Witcher by Andrzej Sapkowski, the book that influenced the eponymous video game and Netfix series. It's a series of 6 books, so it should be enough to last me for this trip.

In the plane

I have a window seat and, luckily, no direct neighbour, which allows me to spread a bit (a lot more comfortable for leg room during the night).

It is a 12h flight, so my objective is to stay awake until the meal (is it lunch or dinner?), then sleep as much as I can, which will be difficult because my body thinks it's the afternoon, not the night...

The meal is pretty basic, I apparently chose the vegetarian option, which was lasagna with peas. I can't remember if that is what I seleted or if there was a mistake from the flight attendant... the other option was beef with mashed potatoes, which I think I would have prefered. Oh well.

Breakfast (served around 7AM Tokyo time) was also pretty basic. The fruit dices were good, the crackers are drying than my humour. Not sure why they serve them at every meal...

I spend a few hours on my computer, mainly creating this blog (pure hand crafted, locally sourced artisinal code, no AI was involved in making this website), then when night time comes (roughly when we are above Turkiye), I'm feelinig tired so I manage to get some sleep. Only about 4-5 hours though, which is not enough... It will be a long day tomorrow.

Since I have a window seat, I was able to enjoy both the sunset and the sunrise. It doesn't look good in pictures, so I'll spare you the blurry mess, but it was pretty nice in reality.

There are still a few hours left until landing, so I spend it writing this blog post (both in English and French!), which takes quite a lot of time... The next days will probably include less text and more pictures (and probably won't be updated daily).

The trajectory we follow by plane is quite ridiculous: the current geopolitical situation makes it so we avoid Russia, Ukraine, Palestine, Mongolia (not sure why we avoided that one) and North Korea... If we could follow the shortest path, it would likely save up at least an hour.

Finally, I arrive at my first destination: Tokyo!

The arrival in Tokyo

There is no problem going through immigration, but it takes a while. The procedures evoled a bit since my last trip to Japan 2 years ago, where it is now possible to fill in the form through a web page, that generates a QR code once done, instead of only having to write it on a paper slip, but there are still many tourists that don't know how to fill in a form, and I have to go through a passport scan 4 times, so there are definitely some possible improvements... In the end, I leave the airport around 10:30.

I expected the temperature in Tokyo to be roughly the same as Copenhagen (from last week, not the stormy mess it was when I left...), but it wasn't: it's around 25°C, and feels like 30°C because of the humidity and lack of wind... There is a typhoon approaching the south of the country, maybe it is causing a heat wave in this part of the country, and it will get better over the next days...

I haven't made any plans for today, and my check-in at the hostel is at 3PM, so I just decide to take the train towards the city center and find something interesting on the map on the way. I stop at Shimbashi, where I drop my stuff in a coin locker. The train system now accepts Visa cards (to some extent), but lockers are still not great, accepting cash or the local payment cards... So I have to withdraw 10k yens, that will be useful in the end because a bunch of places still don't accept Visa cards, or their payment machine is broken... For a developed country, Japan still has a long way to go towards accepting digital payments.

I am so excided to get rid of my warm clothes that I decide to get rid of nearly everything, which was a mistake: there are very few trash bins in Tokyo, due to a bombing attack a while ago that made them remove them all, so having a small backpack in hand is always useful, even if only to carry your trash to the closest bin. And the sun hits pretty hard, so I should have taken my sunscreen and my bottle as wel...

I go to Hamarikyu Gardens by foot from the station, and when I arrive, I see that this weekend, there is the Tokyo Grand Tea Ceremony, which means I'll be able to participate in a traditional tea ceremony, they even have a session in English. Lucky! It is at 2PM, so I still have a lot of time, decide to go around the park and see that I'm once again lucky, as they are going to renovate the briges starting tomorrow, and they will be closed for a while. This would have made me go around the lakes instead of being able to go to the small island on the center, from where I saw large fish jumping out of the water.

In addition to the tea ceremony, there are other things, like small concerts with traditional instruments, which allowed me to discover the Koto, an interesting mix between a harp and a guitar. The capabilities of this instrument are impressive: tremolos, arpeggios, chords on one hand and melody on the other, glissandos and vibratos by bending the string with one hand and playing it with the other...

Since there is still time before the tea ceremony, I decide to go eat in Tsukiji. I go to the Wagyu Sukiyaki restaurant, where I eat... well, sukiyaki with wagyu beef, which is good but the lack of sleep is catching up with me, I'm not feeling hungry enough to finish all the vegetables. The sauce in which they are cooked, made of soy sauce, sugar and mirin, starts having a burnt taste, which also doesn't help and leaves a weird aftertaste...

I then return to the Gardens for the tea ceremony, and even though it is the English session, I'm the only non-Japanese in the crowd. The schoolgirls sitting in front of me may have been able to follow it, but I doubt the elder ladies dressed in traditional clothing could... The matcha was good though, and so was the sweet accompanying it

Train stations are complex...

Once the tea ceremony is done, I decide to go towards the hostel. The Shimbashi station isn't too far, but it's a large one seriving all 3 Japanese rail companies (privatization has done terrible things to this industry...), buses and metro.

It takes me around 20 minutes finding my locker, after I took the wrong path at least 3 times... At least, that allowed my to stumble upon an underground idols concert. The crowd wasn't large, was it was committed: the guys in front were shouting in unison, and some of them took their best camera gear out to make sure that they don't miss a panty shot...

Once I have my backpack, it still takes me something like 15 minutes to find the correct entrance for the metro... Really, large Japanse stations are complex, even when Google Maps indicates clearly which entrance and exit I should take.

My capsule hotel is a few minutes away from the Ningyocho station, which is very convenient. Since I'm tired, I decide to take a quick nap... Just a few minutes... or 4 hours. Woops.

Discovering the neighborhood

Since I woke up a bit late, it's now time for dinner. I'm in a cosy neighborhood with plenty of small restaurants, but most of them close pretty early. I choose to go for a tonkatsu, at Fujiki Ningyocho, which is exquisite: the pork is extremenly tender, the rest going very well with it. I particularly appreciate the complementary barley tea and the miso soup that contains a bunch of small oysters. That's one of the things I like with Japanese restaurants: even if they all serve rice and miso soup, they each have their own recipe for the miso soup, which keeps it interesting and I find it to be a good metric for how good a restaurant is.

I then walk around the neighborhood, which is very quite: there isn't a lot of night life here, and restaurants are nearly all closed at that point. I also decided to go through the smallest streets, because that's where you can find hidden gems, like all those temples that are kept in the middle of more modern buildings.

After that, I just stay in the hotel "lobby" (very small, just a long table next to the windows on the ground floor...) to write today's report. It takes too long though, the next days will definitely be less detailed...

While I'm doing that, there is a guy sitting next to me, enjoying his konbini dinner very loudly. I don't understand how people can be raised to eat like porks, not closing their mouth... I have to suffer his gross mouth melody for a while, next time I'll take my noise cancelling headphones...