t-o-k-y-o

konichiwa! guess which country we holiday-ed in, in the end? yupp...japan it is! we only had the time and money to cover one city, so we went to tokyo. from the moment we arrived, till the moment we left, we could not believe that we were actually in tokyo, because it was an extremely last min plan!

anw the entire trip was a blast, but it was really very tiring because we did tons of walking, running and travelling. the places that we managed to cover include - shinjuku (we stayed here), kabuki-cho in shinjuku, tokyo, asakusa, ueno, shibuya, roppongi, hakone, harajuku, akihabara and...DISNEY LAND!! or rather, disney sea =)

the entire japan subway system is friggin confusing. there are like 5 different subway companies, and not all areas are covered by all the 5 companies. the tickets are also hard to figure out, and we had to get our tickets refunded a couple of times because we got the wrong ones. we actually spent more than half an hour on saturday figuring out how to get to our destination.

because the entire trip was so last min, no proper planning was done, hence we spent close to an hour locating our hotel on the first day. and it didn't help that i noted down the wrong train exit, or that we didn't have the address of the hotel, the name of the hotel in jap, or a map of tokyo...HAHA...how kok right? but after we located it, getting around the area was pretty easy.

despite the common belief that if one cannot speak jap, one should not travel to japan alone..we managed to survive there with our wonderful hand signals! after being in japan for just one day, we were already behaving like the japanese...bowing for no rhyme or reason. haha...

Disney sea was absolutely fun! i wanted to go to disneyland initially, but charles' friend, keith (not a joke), recommended that we go to disney sea instead. glad that we heeded his advice, because there were tons of rollercoaster rides there, unlike the kiddy rides in disneyland. the tower of terror was the worst, and my heart almost popped out of my throat from all the screaming! charles went a bit crazy buying snacks from disney sea, and i think he only realised when we were packing..haha! other than that, we didn't have the time to do much shopping, because we were trying to cover as much places as we could.

anw, know how japan is like the capital of porn...well it really is. we went into one of those supposed comic shops, because i wanted to find for this gundam thing that my colleagues wanted, and we found that behind the first row of shelves that contained comic books, the remaing 3/4 of the shop sold porn! and the most disgusting thing was that they sold porno dvds of kids that were 10-12 yrs old. how sick is that?! then there was another floor that sold like hard core porn, and there were tons of shady uncles and geeks hanging around the shelves, scrutinising the dvds that were for sale. omg totally fit the stereotype of perverts, man! this dodgy looking guy even wore really dark shades in the shop, and he walked out with a WHOLE BAG of dvds! *gulp*

ok enough about the porn...now food. ramen is like the common food staple in japan. there can be like 10 ramen shops in one street. i was CRAVING for a hot bowl of ramen on our second night in tokyo, but was quite disappointed when i got a bowl of shou mian with tons of cabbage instead, and charles got this bowl of dry noodles that turned out to be the crispy noodles that we buy at zhi-char stalls here. haha..wtf. then on the third day we had a nice bowl of fatty char siew ramen, and in the night we had ramen again. after that i felt like puking whenever i saw or smelled ramen. hahahhahaha....so we stayed off ramen for the rest of the trip.

ah okay...i'm getting lazy already..shall continue another time with pictures!