Golden Week Part I: Tokyo

The blessed genius of Japan's Golden Week (which consists of about five days off in a row due to national holidays) gave us the opportunity to have yet another family member to come and romp around the country with: my mom (below, fresh off of the plane from Kansas)! Jacob and I flew down to Tokyo to meet her, and we spent our first four days of Golden Week soaking in as much of the World's Largest City (and brilliantly sunny weather) as we could handle:

Fortunately (and unfortunately...later post to come) Japan's famed cherry blossoms were about a week to two weeks late this year. Because of this, we happened upon the last of Tokyo's beautiful sakura trees, and decided to pay our respects:

"Going to" Tokyo usually consists of a lot of walking, people-watching, fashion-gawking, food consumption, and dazed wonderment in general. We found that two of the best places for all of the above were the overly affluent Ginza district (I like to count the ugly Louis Vuttion bags), followed by some serious youth culture overload in Shibuya for the evening:

Fortunately, our chef, Jacob, was on hand to cook us a grand meal of yakisoba and veggies back at the hostel (he's so handy to have when traveling!):

Just like last year with my sister, we used the 4:30am Tokyo sunrise to pry us out of bed in order to make the journey down to the famed Tsukiji Fish Market on the harbor. This place truly is an incredible throng of merciless motorized carts speeding down the narrow lanes, busy wholesalers weighing and cutting their stock for the day, band-saws slicing through huge frozen tuna as if they were pieces of lumber, and local restaurant owners perusing the more than 400 different types of sea critters at their disposal. This is the single largest wholesale fish and seafood market in the world, and I highly recommend it if you find yourself in Tokyo:

And besides all of that, after dodging mucky water puddles and the above-mentioned demon carts, this place is, without a doubt, where you can get yourself the freshest sushi breakfast ever! Not sure if you like sushi? Leave it to a middle-aged, Kansas lady to tell you that, when it's this fresh, it's really actually pretty tasty:

The look on Jacob's face isn't from his bowl of sashimi...It's from waking up at the butt-crack of dawn with no coffee and a breakfast of only fish fumes:

Not having or owning a car for a couple of years now, I don't tend to think too much about all the public transportation we normally take here to get us around (including a ton of walking as well). It's nice to have visitors who again point out these things, especially if they come from a state where public transportation is a novelty at best:

My mom thinks the people on the subway, however, really need to lighten up:

Tokyo may be billed as one of the most expensive cities in the world, but there are actually quite a few free things for a visitor to do as well. One of them is catching the awesome view of the city (where, on clear days, you can see Mt. Fuji as well) from the top floor of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government building:

Some scenes from the lovely area of Asakusa, where we actually stayed (below). Although it's not as central as some of the other districts in Tokyo, Asakusa tends to have retained a little more of its "old Tokyo" charm than the rest of the ever-modernizing city has, and that's why I like to stay here:

Our last day in Tokyo, Jacob hopped on a big bird back to Sapporo to beckon the calls of work, and Mom and I headed off to walk around the Meiji Jingu shrine, which totally makes you forget that you're walking around in the middle of downtown Tokyo. We got lucky and happened upon a couple of traditional weddings. And we even filled out an ema (votive tablet with a prayer written on it which are hung in Shinto shrines) for the ultimate in full shrine experience:

After some major fashion-gawking and an organic buffet lunch in Harajuku, we boarded a train to the mountain town of Nikko to spend a few days in Tokyo's opposite!

Part II of our trip to come...

Golden Week Japan Part I: Tokyo

Ahh, Golden Week in Japan...a time when there are actually three national holidays in a row, sandwiched by two weekends!  It's only curse, as far as travel within Japan goes, is that it's the time when those who rarely use vacation days (ahem...THE JAPANESE) actually get out and see their country!

For my Golden Week adventures this year, my little sister, Carissa, flew over the big Pacific swimming pool to join me for a two-week tromp around some of Japan's most crowded destinations during this time.  First stop...TOKYO!

One of our Tokyo highlights was meeting up with my roommate, Kaori, from my freshman year in college.  The last time I saw her was in 2002 when she came and visited me while I was studying abroad in the Netherlands!  A reunion seven years in the making:

Kaori is in charge of a lovely, lovely spa in downtown Tokyo and had her gals give us free facials and makeovers!  My skin had a new Asian glow about it...no doubt quickly undone from the thick cloud of bus exhaust I stepped into shortly after:

The rest of Thursday we spent in the fabulously trendy Shibuya district, where every store, freaky hipster, and mini-skirted school girl easily challenges your inner and outer coolness factor big time:

The sign below (on a tres trendy love hotel) says Shibuya Crystal...sweet!

This is taken from the (almost) middle of the infamous Shibuya crossing where, at every red light, traffic comes to a six-way stop, releasing a super surge pandemonium of about 1500 people in a mad dash to make it to their respected neon island oasis...yes, that's 1500 people EACH time!  The video (not mine) shows the crossing in its full glory.

Thanks mostly in part to Carissa's jet-lag and the 4:30am sunrise, we were up by a quarter to five in the morning on Friday and decided to head down to Tokyo's world-famous Tsukiji Fish Market!  It is the largest wholesale fish and seafood market in the world, and includes some 900 wholesale vendors selling everything from caviar and sardines, to massive (MASSIVE) tuna and deadly fugu (blowfish).  This is no place to walk around in your party-shoes (or muck-absorbing canvas Converse as I personally found out):

Can you believe how HUGE these tuna are?  This is at the end of the tuna auction, where restaurants and wholesalers send their registered bidders to snag the best bang for their buck--err, yen:

I love fish-heads on a stick:

How do you end a morning at the bustling fish market?  Why with a fresh sushi breakfast at one of the alley stalls down the street, of course!!

We also had a chance to meet up with my travel-buddy, Taka, who I first met in Dublin when I was living in Ireland!  His Japanese friend and a friend from Mexico joined us for some yakiniku (BBQ), so we had a grand international affair all through slightly confusing weaves of Japanese, Spanish, and English:

Saturday we headed to Harajuku for some serious people-watching:

And headed up to Sensoji Temple in Asakusa before hopping the night bus to Kyoto:

So Tokyo's a bit difficult to smash into readable blog, but it was definitely amazing considering I hadn't truly visited the city since those blurry, jet-lagged orientation days back in August!   

Golden Week Part II in Kyoto to come...