Our First Day in Japan!

I'm happy to announce that I'm back in Japan and this time I brought my boyfriend with me! It's always been a dream of mine to travel around Japan with him and we decided back in September that we should make this dream come true!

Once we decided we wanted to stay in Tokyo, I booked the flight pretty much that week. So far, the goal is to try and update videos every night of what we were up to during the day but we're probably going to be around a day behind. I'm having a few camera issues at the moment, so expect this post to go up around our second day in Japan. It took me 4 hours to upload a single video :(

I wanted to start our Japan series off by showing our flight! 

We flew Premium Economy from JFK, and it was really nice! We had awesome legroom and the Japan Airlines staff was as attentive as ever, but I knew from the getgo that I would have trouble sleeping in a traditional plane seat. We were able to recline our seats out pretty far, but it only bought me 4 hours or so of rest. 

I took some videos of the vegan food I received on the flight, but because we were in and out of sleep randomly I actually forgot to capture the dinner meal. Regardless, both Vincent and I really liked the food!

On our first day, we headed to Sensoji Temple!

The next video contains footage from our first official day traveling around, which is when we went to Sensoji Temple and the surrounding area Asakusa and Ueno areas. It's only been one day but we both had a lot of fun and I can honestly say that doing this together is so much better than any time I've ever gone just by myself. 

Check out the video here!

We headed out pretty early in the morning because the plane put our sleep out of whack. We ended up waking up at around 6 am, getting ready and leaving the house at around 7:25. This was good because we got to Sensoji before it got massively crowded, but bad because a lot of the vendors weren't open when we initially arrived.

We got to experience crowds though, don't worry! When we headed back to the temple later in the day for some shopping it was completely packed. We picked up a souvenir or two and then made our way to a nearby cat cafe to check it out.

While we were walking there we saw an advertisement for an 'Exotic animals cafe' and we were immediately interested. We had no idea how to get there though because the button on the elevator for that floor wasn't working. We stopped a man we found and asked about the second floor, and it turned out that he was the owner of the shop. He let us right in and explained the various animals he had.

There were otters, meerkats, lizards, geckos, and a fennec fox! You can see how cute these animals were in the video, as well as these cute snapshots :)

Fennec Fox

After we went to the animal cafe, we decided to walk around a bit more before heading to a local park. We sat and talked for a bit, ate some snacks, and then headed over to Ueno! I really wanted to see if I could get the final squishy for the series I was collecting but sadly the machine had been removed. We decided to get a little blue Daruma with tiny orbs inside which was super cute!

We walked around Ueno Park where we saw some shrines and tried to navigate the whole park. Needless to say, we walked over 18,000 steps! We tried to walk as much as possible to work up an appetite, and it worked! We had an early dinner at the Ueno location of Ichiran ramen, which was so delicious.

Ichiran Ramen

The jetlag kinda got us beat, we ended up going home and falling asleep at around 6pm. We tried to stay up to maintain a normal sleep schedule but it just wasn't in the cards.

Tomorrow is our Akihabara day so be on the lookout for that!