Wow, what a day! I guess I first have to mention that we left our stuffed animal family at home, but Cyndaquil armed with his Carnifex will make sure to protect everyone!

So to keep things and consistent, I’m going to split my daily wrap up into 3 sections; what we did, what we ate, and what we bought because let’s face it, Japan is going to shut up and take our money!

What we did

Essentially we sat in a plane for 8.5 hrs haha. We didn’t have to rush and had everything sorted too. It was a very smooth morning to get to the airport and then onto the plane. Which we didn’t realise was one of the Qantas pride planes till we landed in Tokyo.

On the plane itself, I managed to fit in about 3.5hrs of Pokemon Moon till my 3ds ran out of battery, finally watched Batman the killing joke and also the 3rd Hobbit movie. It was so nice to just chill and do nothing but that.

We landed in Tokyo early and made our way through a very empty airport. We expected it to be bustling and crazy, but it wasn’t and we were so ok with that. After breezing through customs we had 2 two fetch quest items to obtain. 1, a Japanese data sim for those times when we didn’t have wifi and 2, changing our rail pass vouchers for actual rail passes.

With these achievements successfully unlocked, we could then make our way to our first train ride in Japan, the Narita Express. This train was more comfortable and had more room than the plane! After an hour or so on here, we stepped off at Shinjuku station to transfer onto another line to go 1 stop. It was all pretty painless. A 2 min walk later and we were meeting our super friendly Airbnb host to take us to our apartment for the next week. It is small, but we have everything we need and the location is perfect!

By this point we were super tired and starving. It was about 9:30 so we asked our host where was a good place to eat this late. After some suggestions, we walked across the road and probably about 40 metres and found Tiger Gyoza Hall. We decided this would be fine and they had an english menu. I’ll go into details soon, but feeling very satisfied with full bellies we headed home to crash in our bed ready to explore Shinjuku and Harijuku tomorrow!

What we ate

Well mostly plane food. But it was decent plane food!

I had the cheese and spinach tortellini which came with a garlic bread roll and an apple crumble.

And George decided to go with the salmon and rice with an asian marinade (also came with garlic bread and an apple crumble).

I definitely picked the tastiest option :p

Also on the flight we were given a weis bar (hell yes) and close to landing, a little noodle container.

Overall, we were very happy with the plane food. But as soon as we landed we knew that we needed hot delicious soup with some noodles in it. We needed ramen!

Which is where Tiger Gyoza Hall came in. This food was just what we needed. So very tasty and warming and exactly what we expected from Japan. Of course we bought gyoza, 20 in fact. Each little parcel of pork filled goodness was like a warm hug!

Now, I did say we needed ramen, and ramen was on the menu, but another dish caught our eye that we decided to try. So we went with Red hot spicy dan dan noodle soup. It was a good life choice.

Just look at it! This broth was just gloriously flavor filled and had an amazing chilli punch. It wasn’t super spicy by my standards but what it was…was perfect. This is the dish we needed. Of course it was all accompanied by a beer, because beer. I really can’t wait to try all the things food wise on our trip!

What we bought

Nothing exciting…just a sim haha. But this will change soon I am sure of it!

So that’s it. That was our travel day to Japan and our first night in Tokyo. I’m so happy already! Oh and it’s cold haha. But managable cold.