Universal Studios Japan and last morning in Osaka

We are currently driving from Toronto to Sudbury after an amazing trip!  I didn’t have the energy to do the blog on our last night when we had to get all packed up etc. Figured I’d do it in the airports/flights but wasn’t thinking that without internet, this can’t save on this blog platform and I didn’t want to write it all and have it disappear like has happened before!

Before get into the last day, this is the bathtub at our Osaka Airbnb. No idea how Osaka just got linked or how to undo that. 😆 

Joel came out the first night and said I can’t figure out how to get the bath tub on can you come and look?  And I was like Joel I’m trying to unpack. Figure it out. Sometimes you have to try a few things to get it on. Turn the faucets. You will figure it out. And he was like: that’s the thing. There is no faucet. 

Osaka

To start I’ve got this coin holder off Temu because I had heard that you got a lot of coins in Japan and honestly, I thought it was a bit of a gimmick but they were like a dollar  it’s actually turned out to be very helpful.  After you get your change back, you can put each coin into the right slot  I find when I’m in another country using a different currency. I always end up with a lot of change because when you’re at the cash trying to pay it feels like it takes way too much time to sort through the coins since you don’t automatically know what each coin is and you have to search but when they’re nicely sorted like this, you can easily find a $.10 50 Cent etc. and you don’t end up with a whole coin purse full of change

Rainy Day in Kyoto

As I mentioned in the last post today was going to be a rainy day since we had swapped out our plans to just do some quieter activities today that we’re mostly inside our original plan was to hike which just really wasn’t meant to work we really enjoyed the teamlabPlanets that we did in And a new teamLab opened up in Kyoto a few months ago so I got tickets online for 10:30 AM.  that meant everyone got to sleep until about nine. I was up at 6 AM, of course re-jigging the itinerary for the day. Since we had some extra time, Trevor and I decided to walk over to 711 in the morning so that we could get our 7-Eleven smoothies which was on our food scavenger hunt. There are two different kinds of smoothies they have at 7-Eleven some of them are frozen and you blend them and then some of them are more like frappe’s. The one near our place only had the frappe version

We buy pastries at 7-Eleven every day for breakfast and it never ceases to amaze us. The ones we see this is literally just a hotdog bun filled with whipped cream so many sandwiches and buns in Japan are just filled with whipped cream.

Nara

Woo hoo my photos came in the right way today!

Today we did a day trip to Nara from Kyoto. Nora is about an hour away by train. Nora is known for having deer that walk all over the city. It’s quite a cool place and I’d say this is one of our favourite days.

Arashiyama

I read yesterday‘s post and I realized how crazy it is and how many mistakes there are sorry about that. I’m doing these blog posts between 9 and 10 PM at night and I’m absolutely exhausted. It requires me to go through my pictures and I’m also making a daily video for Facebook so it’s a lot but I do really enjoy looking back at these and I do read them so they’re mostly just for me.

I’ve uploaded my pictures twice and they’ve come in backwards both times and I have no idea why so you’re just gonna have to go with backwards pictures todayWe got up this morning and I made some Matcha for myself and Joel with the Matcha set that they left us. It was actually very good. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. I really thought I didn’t like green tea and it’s still maybe not my absolute favourite but I did enjoy it this morning.it was fun eating at our little Japanese table

Kyoto

We had tickets booked today for the Shinkansen which is the highest speed train between Tokyo and Kyoto. ourtrain was at 9:17 am. All the trains and subways we’ve taken so far have not been scheduled so it’s totally fine if we show up 20 minutes later than we had plans will be, but our Shinkansen tickets were purchased in advance and we couldn’t miss the train.  we also had to pack up our whole apartment, which is so much work. We were really spoiled spending seven nights in one apartment.So we left quite early for the train station.  Many people get Bento box for the high-speed train  The stations that have the high-speed trains go through them have 1000 different kinds of bento boxes. They are called ekiben  eki- train station and Ben short for bento.  Here are some pictures of us choosing our ekibens  

Tokyo - Day 3

 These are Trev socks that he got at Family Mart as a souvenir they have branded with the family mart colors. He says they’re the best socks ever.

Tokyo - Day 2

I had the best sleep last night and didn’t wake up until 7 AM. When my alarm went off, I couldn’t believe it. I was hoping to sleep until 6 AM since I had slept until 5 AM the day before but it sure

I had the best sleep last night and didn’t wake up until 7 AM. When my alarm went off, I couldn’t believe it. I was hoping to sleep until 6 AM since I had slept until 5 AM the day before but it sure felt good to get a full night sleep

Was only about a half hour to get to Warner Brothers Studios, where we were headed, but we accidentally got on the wrong train and headed in the wrong direction and we had to get off that train and figure out how to get on the new trains. this is us wandering through the city on foot from one train station to the next to try to readjust..

Kamakura

Hasedera Temple

Well, I slept until 5 AM last night which I’ll call a win Trevor and the kids all had great sleeps. We didn’t have to leave until about 9 AM this morning to head to Kamakura. It took about an hour and a half to get there so we got there at 10:30 AM. Turns out honestly we should’ve left a little bit earlier as the first shopping street was really really fun. 

Getting stamps at the station near our Airbnb

DisneySea

Today probably isn’t going to be the most thrilling log post. We spent the day at Tokyo Disney Sea. It was an amazing day and really fun, but there’s probably not too too much to tell other than we went on a ride a lot of rides and ate a lot of food. It took us about an hour and 10 minutes to get there this morning. We had to take four different trains/subways. We’ve left our Airbnb at 6:10 AM and arrived around 7:30 AM The park opened at 9 AM so we were quite early, but there was already huge crowds when we arrived This is a picture of the Disney monorail, which was the last part of the train journey

Mount Takao

So to start, this was what the subways were like when we decided to take the taxi back yesterday  exactly like this  😬 https://youtube.com/shorts/nrHXCTzDo2k?si=bOvEkRFanzk6MN36

Google Translate is great and it has been a fantastic tool. We use it many many many times a day to translate everything but even when you use it, things aren’t perfectly clear. Here is the translation from the washing machine to see if you can figure out how to run a cycle

Tokyo Day 1

 We all slept pretty well last night. I did wake up at 3 AM and so did Trevor but we were able to sleep a little bit after that. We were all awake early this morning by about 615. We had planned to leave the room at about eight, but since we were all up and moving, we ended up leaving at 7:15. Our first stop this morning was Senso-hiTemple. 

Breakfast




Senso-ji Temple

Arrival Day!

Our flight was really good and uneventful today. It left on time.