Where to, Gumshoe? – Page 10 – Follow us through our day to day travels and adventures

Tokyo (Day 53): Tsukiji, Ginza, Roppongi

April 22, 2016

We finally got our act together and woke up a bit earlier to go to Tsukiji Market. We didn’t attempt to try to go for the tuna auction, which only allows up to 120 people and you have to get there as early as 3am to try to snag a spot. Maybe if we’re in Tokyo again and we’re jetlagged (too bad we were in Taipei for the 4am wake ups), I would try to go. Another reason why we wanted to go to Tsukiji Market was because they’re moving to another location further away and more inconvenient in November. Tsukiji Market has been there since 1935 and the majority of vendors are against the move.

As soon as we got off the train at Tsukiji-Shijo Station we could smell the fish in the station. We met up with William and made our way to the wholesale market which only opens up to the public after 9am. We arrived a little later than we wanted to (around 9:30am) so a lot of the vendors were already in the middle of packing things up. But we did get to see large pieces of tuna and a man filleting a live sea eel (unagi), which was very cool. It was really neat to see all the wholesalers at work and seeing them cleaning up/chilling out after a long day’s work.

When you’re in the wholesale market you have to be vigilant at all times of the motorized mini trucks since they go really fast and don’t really care about the tourists around. Basically, tourists being there are more of a burden than a benefit since no one buys anything and are just in the way taking pictures. I get why there are no tourists allowed before 9am, since that’s when the real business happens. Along with tourist there were locals who were buying some items for their meals for the day (a pretty good place to buy it)

After going up and down the rows we decided to find some sushi for an early lunch. William left to go do his own thing and we said we could meet up again later. There are two main restaurants that have by far the longest line ups – Sushi Dai and Daiwa Sushi. For both these restaurants, people line up at 3am and wait 4 hours to get a seat. There was no way Tim and I were going to wait for 4 hours in the middle of the night to eat sushi at 7am (I don’t care how super fresh it is). Tim doesn’t even like to wait 30 minutes in line for food so this was not going to be an option.

When we passed by Sushi Dai at 10:30am, we thought the line up looked reasonable, about 15 people outside the front door so we lined up. The lady from the restaurant came out with her huge notepad and told us that the line up starts behind the building. We looked and said forget it, there were about 50 more people waiting there.

We ended up going to a place called Sushizanmai, which has multiple locations in Tokyo but its original is at Tsukiji. The owner, Kiyoshi Kimura, is known for going to the tuna auction and winning the bids on the most expensive tuna and selling it to his customers at a fraction of the price as his competitors. We only waited about 10 minutes to get a seat at the sushi bar. The prices here are very reasonable and the Bluefin fatty tuna was 398 JPY per piece vs. 520 JPY at Numakuzo (conveyor belt sushi place we went to in Shinjuku). We decided to order a la carte to get exactly what we wanted, although the combos and chirashi dons looked really good too. For our 15 pieces of nigiri and a cone, our bill was 3,503 JPY = $39.70 CAD, pretty good.

Each sushi chef behind the counter was in charge of a group of people. We sat down at a really good spot on the counter because we had the happiest guy in the restaurant. If we looked around at the other sushi chefs, they were all very serious and had no expressions. Our sushi chef was enthusiastic and super friendly so it made our experience at Sushizanmai a really good one. All the sushi was awesome and I would definitely go back there again. If you don’t want to wait (or value your time and sleep more) hours for Sushi Dai, I would recommend going here. I don’t think you can really go wrong with freshness at many of the restaurants that surround the market. Or maybe we’re missing out by not lining up at Sushi Dai. I’m okay not knowing what I’m missing out on.

After lunch, we decided to take a leisurely stroll towards Ginza and check out Roppongi Hills. William suggested that we go to the Tokyo City Views observation deck as it has the best views of Tokyo (and is the nicest observation deck) in his opinion and most importantly, it has a Sailor Moon exhibit going on for the next couple weeks.

Tsukiji is a relatively short walk to Ginza. It was a nicer day yesterday than the time we went there previously. It made for a much more pleasant experience. We didn’t go into Uniqlo this time but went to the large Mitsukoshi department store (in Taiwan they’re called Shin Kong Mitsukoshi) and went through each floor. Japanese department stores are all really nice and large. They have a great selection of brands (a lot of luxury brands if you’re into that sort of thing) and the interior is well put together. I like how there’s nicer restaurants on the top floors and the basements are always full of great take out food and desserts. If only Vancouver had a department store like this, it would put Nordstrom and Holts to shame, but we don’t have the population to support multiple stores like these.

I enjoyed my time at Mitsukoshi looking at all the pretty things while Tim found a chair to sit on and played on his phone. Being decked out in Lululemon clothes, runners and a backpack, I definitely did not fit in (I don’t fit in dressed like this in Japan, period). We have a few weddings to go to in the summer so I was browsing around to see if there were any dresses that caught my eye. I went to the formal dress section of the store and it was basically all black; black dresses, pants, blazers, purses, hats. I guess black is the only formal colour in Japanese culture. It looked more like a funeral wear to me.

Before coming to Japan, I knew that there was a popular dessert that was a cake made up of layers of crepe with whip cream in between each layer. The cake is called a crepe mille-feuille. I was on the hunt for these since I know New York has a store called Lady M that specializes in these yummy looking cakes. There is a café chain in Tokyo called, Doutor, that had it on their menu so we planned on going to one eventually when we felt like we wanted to sit down and try it. Being in Ginza wandering around, we spotted a Café Doutor (a fancier looking version of Doutor) and decided to sit down and get one there. We spent a good hour in the café resting and watching the crowds in Ginza. It was 500 JPY ($5.65 CAD) well spent and the cake was delicious too. Later on we found out that a regular Doutor’s millefeuille is only 360 JPY = $4 CAD. So we paid a premium to sit in the Ginza location, oh well.

We also visited the large Sony showroom in Ginza, which has 6 floors of products that you can try (Tim had fun in this store). The store is also a good escape from the crowds as their first floor lounge is labeled as a rest and free wifi area. It has cushioned benches and couches for people to sit on.

We walked from Ginza towards the Minato area, which is closer to Tokyo Tower and Roppongi Hills. We stopped by Tokyo Tower to take some photos of it and found a beautiful park beside it which felt like we were in the middle of a forest, not in the middle of Tokyo. We continued along towards Roppongi Hills as we were meeting William at around sunset to go up to the top of the viewing deck.

Roppongi is a very nice area in Tokyo. It’s an area that has large hotel chains and restaurants by celebrity chefs (like Jean Georges and Joel Robuchon). The area looks very modern and is filled with restaurants that you would find in trendy areas of New York. You also notice a lot more ex-pats in this area and Caucasian children in day cares. We saw a day care wheeling around 10 toddlers like a crate of puppies. It was quite cute.

We arrived in the area well before we had to meet William so we decided to check out a book store called Tatsuya, which had a fancy Starbucks downstairs. The place was packed with people drinking coffee and on their Macbooks. Tatsuya had a good selection of books and magazines, a lot of which were English publications. The top floor of Tatsuya is full of DVDs and after looking closely, we discovered they’re rentals. Since Blockbuster is no longer around, I haven’t seen a store this size full of rentals for a while. They had all the popular American TV series like “House of Cards”, “Suits”, “Game of Thrones” – anything you can think of.

While in Japan, I noticed that Starbucks was promoting a new cantaloupe frappuccino (not sure if it’s a limited time item). It looked interesting and I only saw it in Japan so I wanted to try. I thought it would be a perfect time to try it since Tim was happy reading and I could get the drink and find a seat and surf the net. The frappuccino only comes in one size, a tall. It was actually quite expensive, at 680 JPY = $7.80 CAD because it contains real cantaloupe and not just syrup. The drink was really good, it had mushed up chunks of cantaloupe and some sort of jelly in it. I would order it again if it were half the price or less (Tim: so I guess you won’t be ordering it again).

We met up with William at Mori Tower, and decided to have dinner before going up since the weather changed and there was no longer visible sun to have a sunset. Finding food around this area was a bit tough since a lot of the restaurants are pretty swanky and there are fewer cheaper options.

After doing a bit of research on our phones, we decided on a soba noodle place close by, called Sarashina Horii, that had very good reviews. They make their soba in house and have four different types. When we arrived at the restaurant it was almost full. They had a lot of tables with reserved signs on them. We all ordered soba and a side of tempura. The tempura was actually more expensive than the actual soba. I thought everything was good but I wouldn’t go back again unless the price was half of what we paid. Looking around this was a very popular spot for locals and we appeared to be the only tourists there.

After dinner we made our way back to Mori Tower and went up to the top of the observatory. It costs 1,800 JPY to go up but William told us we could buy discounted tickets at Lawson’s for 1,500 JPY. We stopped by a Lawson’s during our walk from Ginza and the cashier helped us with the kiosk, which was all in Japanese so we were lucky he did everything for us. Normally I’m not too keen on paying for observatory decks but since they did have a Sailor Moon exhibit as well, I was intrigued.

When we got to the top, the Sailor Moon exhibit was pretty prominent and they even had a themed café, which had a line up of women outside. The views of the city at night were nice. Tokyo Tower was only lit half-way up in purple, which we’re guessing was in honour of Prince. The exhibit was actually a lot better than I thought it would be. They had original comic books, sketches, costumes and a lot of memorabilia and toys displayed. The gift shop was full of overpriced items but Japanese women and men were going crazy and dropping things into their baskets like they were $1.

After a long day of a lot of walking and wandering, we made our way back to our apartment. While taking the train back, it was actually very crowded, and I was pushed from all angles. It was Friday night and everyone was in good spirits since the work week was over. We saw some very drunk businessmen passed out on sidewalks sleeping on top of their briefcases with their cell phones very exposed (they aren’t worried about theft here). We even saw one on the ground throwing up at Shinjuku Station. We also noticed that on Friday nights, people cross the smaller streets even when the lights are red (generally no one crosses in Japan). It’s like since it’s the weekend, rules are broken.

Total steps today: 28,000

Tokyo (Day 52): Tatsunoya, Asakusa, and Shinagawa

April 21, 2016

After a long day at DisneySea the day before, we struggled to wake up early to meet William at Tsukiji Market. As we were snoozing our alarms, William messaged and said he was going to be late because he slept in. I took this opportunity to reschedule to Friday since Tim didn’t look like he was going to be waking up any time soon.

Since we no longer had set plans for today, we decided to try a ramen place that is down the street from our apartment that constantly has a line up out the door and on the sidewalk. After using Google Maps, we found out the name of the restaurant is Tatsunoya.

Tatsunoya opens each day at 11am, so we made sure we got there right when it opened. When we arrived, there was a group of four businessmen (or just men in suits) ahead of us as they opened the doors (Tim: flashier suits (by Japanese standards), vests, and flamboyant pocket squares made me think they weren’t your regular salary men…). We tried to watch the four men order on the ticket machine to see what they were getting. There is no English on the menu but they have small pictures. We couldn’t really tell what the difference between the black and red bowl were from the small pictures so we ordered one of each (Tim ordered a bowl with more meat).

On the table they had jars of seasoned bean sprouts, pickled greens and pickled ginger for you to snack on or add to your ramen. The waitress came by and presented me with a box of individually packaged hair ties and asked if I wanted one (my hair was down). I said sure and tied up my hair. I thought that was a nice touch and it was the first time I’ve had that offered to me at a noodle soup restaurant. It’s also nice because hair ties in Japan are very pricey. Even at Daiso, you only get two hair ties for 100 JPY and Muji you get one for 300 JPY.

The ramen arrived and it looked really good. The broth is a tonkotsu broth similar to Ippudo and Ichiran. What Tatsunoya is known for is their very tender pork. The pork was very fatty (which usually bothers me more) but when I ate it, it basically melted in my mouth and tasted really delicious. I can see why there is a line up for this place. I later found out that Tatsunoya has a couple of restaurants around LA.

We left feeling satisfied and happy that we got there when we did as the line up was starting to build up. After lunch, we headed to Asakusa to visit the Senso-ji Temple.

We took the train to Ueno Station (which is the closest JR line train to the temple). We walked about 20 minutes to the temple and found massive crowds and a shopping street of souvenirs that lead to the shrine. Although there were a lot of people, it was fairly calm (Tim: I didn’t think it was that calm, but I guess it was okay considering how crowded it was).

We took our time around the temple area and slowly made our way back to Ueno Station. The Asakusa area (away from the temple) is very quiet and seems more residential than other parts of Tokyo. When we were walking back we saw a lot of girls that looked like they’re 5 or 6 walking home from school alone. I’ve noticed that Asian kids are very independent here. They walk and take the subway home by themselves. We saw this a lot in Taiwan and now Japan.

Since our JR passes expired today, we figured we’d do a full loop of the Yamanote line and go to Shinagawa. By the time we got to Shinagawa, it was pouring rain (and it poured for the rest of the day). Our plan in this area was to visit the Sengaku-Ji Temple and to just explore the tiny alleys around the taller office buildings in the area. You see even more black suits in Shinagawa than you do in Shinjuku since it’s more of a business district.

Sengaku-Ji Temple is where the famous 47 Ronin (samurais without a leader) are buried, who had avenged the death of their master and committed honorary suicide as a result. This story is popular with Japanese people as the ronins showed considerable loyalty. This is a pretty interesting story, but involves a lot of suicide. The graves of the samurais are found at Sengaku-Ji. When we got there around 5pm, the buildings which likely have more English information and a running video were closed. Unfortunately none of the signage is translated into English so we had to wait until later to read the full story. The Wikipedia article that’s linked has a really detailed story.

After the temple, we walked back towards the train station and walked towards the office towers. It was about 6pm and a lot of people were getting off work. Tim wanted me to see all the taller office buildings and see how narrow the alleys are around them (alleys full of restaurants). We only stayed a short while as the rain was picking up. We decided to head back to Shinjuku for dinner and go back to the apartment earlier tonight.

I guess we timed it a bit badly since we ended up going back to Shinjuku during rush hour.

Tim was craving Japanese hamburger steak so we wandered around Shinjuku trying to find one. The one we had looked up on the train ended up being permanently closed. We found a place around the corner that looked promising so we decided to try it. It’s basically like a Pepper Lunch type of place where they serve the food on a sizzling teppan with paper around it so the oil doesn’t splatter.

The hamburger steaks came with rice and soup that we could help ourselves to. Overall it was okay good because it was extremely oily. If you want a good hamburger steak in Vancouver, try Cafe de L’Orangerie near the Arthur Laing Bridge. They make a really good hamburger steak as well as delicious Japanese pastas and home made desserts (one of our favourite restaurants).

It was still raining hard so we decided to check out the shopping close by – Takashimaya and another mall. I got excited because I saw a “Flying Tiger” store in one of the malls. This store is from Copenhagen and the first time I went to one was in Cambridge, UK. I thought it was a really neat store (feels Ikea-esque because it’s Scandinavian and cheap) that carried pretty random things – everything from arts and crafts to dishes. It’s where I got my carrot sharpener/peeler.

We headed back to the apartment fairly early and did some much needed laundry. Staying in Airbnbs have allowed us to do laundry while we stay here but in Asia you need to hang dry everything, so basically we can’t wash everything because then we’ll have no dry clothes for the next day.

Steps today: 24,000

Tokyo Disney (Day 51): Tokyo DisneySea

April 20, 2016

Today we woke up pretty excited. We were going to Tokyo Disney! When Tim and I first met, we discovered during our first date that we both had a very soft spot for anything Disney, and in particular, Disneyland.

My love for Disney started at an early age, it was a popular summer vacation spot for my family (Tim: How magical!) and by the time I was 12, I had been to Disneyland six times. I loved everything about those trips. But as my sister and I got older, the Disneyland trips ended and we went on family trips to more “mature places” – like Europe and China.

Tim has been to more Disney theme parks as an adult more than anyone I know (besides people who live in a city with a Disneyland or have an annual pass). As I got to know Tim, I was so excited to have found someone who shared the same enthusiasm for Disneyland that I had. One of our first trips together in April 2013 was going to Disneyland Park in California. We only spent one day at the Disneyland and California Adventures but it brought back so many good memories of my childhood. Having someone who was just as giddy about being there as me was awesome.

Now back to this morning, we woke up early eager to get going. We did a bit of research online about Tokyo Disney and found out they had two parks – Disneyland and DisneySea. Disneyland is said to be very similar to Disneyland Park in California (except a bit smaller) and DisneySea is unique to Tokyo. We read countless rave reviews about DisneySea and since it was only in Tokyo, we decided to spend our day there.

We left our apartment around 7:45am and made our way towards Shinjuku Station. It was my first time experiencing Tokyo rush hour. Let’s just say I’ve never been that squished from all directions in my life.

Once we got to Tokyo Station, we had to transfer to the Keiyo Line to get to Disneyland. The Keiyo Line at Tokyo Station seems like it is the farthest line away from the Chuo line. We walked about 8 minutes and walked down and up multiple sets of stairs to reach the platform. After 15 minutes on the train, we finally made it to Tokyo Disney Resort!

When we arrived, we still had to walk about 10 minutes to DisneySea’s entrance gates. There is a Disney train but the ride costed 240 JPY = $2.75 CAD per person, so we just walked.

When we arrived at the gate, we bought our tickets for the day. Recommendations online tell you to try to get tickets beforehand (either online or from a Disney Store) in order to skip the long queues and avoid tickets selling out for the day (I didn’t know that happened). Luckily, we didn’t have any issues and waited less than 5 minutes to buy our tickets. The day pass for DisneySea (same for Disneyland) is 7,400 JPY = $86 CAD per person. This is cheaper than Disneyland in California as their one day pass is $93 USD = $118 CAD. Unfortunately there’s no “one day hopper” like in California, so we had to choose one park only (Tim: which was fine, having never been to DisneySea before, I wanted to spend the whole day there). There is, however, cheap entrance after 6pm at both parks for 4,200 JPY = $48 CAD. I guess that’s good if you lived close by.

There are seven different themed areas within DisneySea:

Mediterranean Harbor
This area looks like you’re in Italy (sort of). There’s a gondola ride through the canals which was really nice. We didn’t get a chance to go on the gondola since they stop the rides when there are water shows in the main pond.

The sky is real, not like the Venetian Hotel in Vegas

Gondola rides through the canals with a view of the “Mysterious Island” volcano/which is also a ride (Tim: Journey to the Center of the Earth)

We watched the “Crystal Wishes Journey” which was a water and boat show. The kites were being flown by passengers on the back of jet skis. We watched from the side of the Mediterranean Harbor. People camp out for 2 hours before the show starts to get good seats front and center. For the prime seating areas, you are only allowed to sit on the ground (they provide mats for you to sit on).
American Waterfront
Disney wouldn’t feel right without something American. This area has New York City streets, Tower of Terror, Toy Story Mania, Cape Cod and a huge steam boat called the “SS Columbia”. This area is also one of the largest parts of the park, so naturally we spent a lot of time here.

Tim in “NYC”

Broadway Theatre.

We watched “Big Band Beat” at the Broadway theatre. It was reviewed as the best show in all of DisneySea, and it lives up to its claim. It’s a live jazz show with a full band and live singing and dancing (like a Broadway show). All the songs for this are in English and the show lasts for about 30 minutes. To get tickets you have to scan your ticket for a lottery or else you have to wait in the stand by line. We got the show we wanted (there are 5 shows a day), but I think in the summer or high season tickets are harder to get in the lottery.

Tower of Terror. We did this near the end of the night and it was the only ride we had to wait over an hour for (we fast passed everything else, but the fast passes were out by the time we wanted to fast pass Tower of Terror).

My screams were genuine. I’m always reminded why I don’t like this ride.

Toy Story Mania was pretty, all lit up at night. We ended our night here playing the Toy Story Mania game (our fast pass return time wasn’t until 9:20pm!)
Port Discovery
This is more of the “futuristic” part of the park. We didn’t spend too much time in this area since it was one of the smallest parts of the park. One of the last rides we went on was the StormRider, which unexpectedly gets you wet! A guy we saw in a suit (this was not an uncommon sight) took out a towel and put it on his lap before the ride started. I guess he’s a regular.

Aquatopia. At night, there on blinking lights on the boats and around the water.
Arabian Coast
It is what it sounds like – think of Aladdin. This area was pretty with smells of Indian curry coming from the restaurants. We went on Sinbad’s Storybook Voyage which was sort of the park’s equivalent to “It’s a Small World”. (Tim: in the sense that you’re on a boat going through rooms with scenes set up using a bunch of moving robots… so sort of like Pirates of the Carribean as well)

Arabian Coast

Arabian Coast’s pretty carousel

Riding on “Jasmine’s Magic Carpet Ride” which was like Dumbo

5. Lost River Delta
This area is supposed to be in the remote areas of Central American jungles and ruins of an ancient civilization. We seemed to have spent a lot of time here since there were a couple of good rides here: Indiana Jones and a roller coaster called, Raging Spirits.

Raging Spirits roller coaster. It felt a bit like the corkscrew at Playland since it had a 360 loop. The ride was 1 minute and 38 seconds, but felt much shorter!

Indiana Jones was just like California’s. We rode this twice!

6. Mysterious Island
This area is fairly small and we only spent a short period of time here. The area looked pretty cool with the volcano (Journey to the Centre of the Earth ride).

Waiting to go to the centre of the earth in Mysterious Island

Mysterious Island’s water submarine ride

7. Mermaid’s Lagoon
We spent the least amount of time in this area since it was filled with little kid rides and theatre shows.

The park is pretty big and I can see why they don’t do a one day hopper here. Tim was really good at organizing our day and scheduling out all our FastPasses with the most popular rides. There’s a live app that tells you the wait times for each ride and the FastPass times available. We went on every ride we wanted to and even got to go on Indiana Jones twice (had two FPs during the day). For April, the park was fairly busy and even stayed busy until closing. In California during down season, at night you can go on rides over and over again (especially during the fireworks) since there’s no line up – but not in Tokyo.

What did we eat?
For the most part, there wasn’t much Japanese food in the park. There was a fancy Japanese restaurant, but all the food was still mostly American-“esque” theme park food. We tried to find items that seemed unique and then found some Disney favourites. Here’s some pictures of what we had (we shared everything so we could try more). The only thing that we missed getting were green mochi balls that were supposed to look like the aliens from Toy Story. By the time we got back to the area the stand had already closed. Oh well, next time!

What we found most interesting about the popcorn wasn’t the popcorn flavours themselves, it was the different popcorn buckets that each stand had. Each stand had a different popcorn bucket and apparently they change them all the time (so people actually collect them all). I would estimate that 70% of people we saw had popcorn buckets around their necks of were carrying them cross-body like a purse (Tim: I would estimate 15%).

Overall, everything felt the same (in terms of that magical Disney feel) as Disney in North America. It makes me really happy to see how much Japanese people love Disney. There were more people decked out in Disney gear than I’d ever seen in the American parks. People would even carry stuffed animals they brought from home to the park, I guess so their stuffed animal could experience a fun day at Disney (Tim: apparently it’s a thing to bring your stuffed toys to take pictures with around the park in Tokyo). Dressing up and wearing Disney accessories doesn’t stop at little kids and women, guys do it too, and they do it proudly.

The crowd at Tokyo DisneySea seemed like it was 90% Japanese and 10% Foreigners. Of the 90%, I’m sure a lot of them are from outside the Tokyo area (Tim: I’m sure some of them are, not sure about 90% though). In the evening, we saw a lot of men with black suits on. It seems like some people go to Disney after work is over to just spend the evening.

We stayed at the park until closing (which was at 10pm) and made our way back to Tokyo. Considering it was close to 11pm when we were heading home there was a lot of businessmen on the train. They were all going home either from work or from dinner/drinks with coworkers. The amount of people on the train was like 6pm on the Canada Line for us.

It was a long day, we spent around 13 hours inside the park and about 2 hours of round trip travel time door to door. Although it was a long day, it was an awesome one. It was nice to experience something new and unique. I can see how it’s been reviewed as one of the best Disney Parks in the world as the detailing and themes are all very well done. Next time we come to Tokyo, I want to visit the Tokyo Disneyland. Although it’s nice to see new things, Disney is Disneyland to me because of the nostalgia and warm fuzzy feeling you get when you hear “When you Wish Upon a Star”.

Steps today: 36,000! (No wonder our legs are tired)

(Tim: And with the 36,000 steps today, we reached 1,000,000 steps on our trip so far! Couldn’t have been a better day for us to reach that milestone.)

How I Track Our Spending: Spreadsheets

As you can infer from my posts about our spending, in order to analyze your spending, you have to first keep track of it. In this post, I’m going to go over briefly how we keep track of our spending, and then share and go over an Excel Spreadsheet you can use if you don’t already have a method for tracking your spending.

I’ll say upfront that I don’t actually think it’s important what you use to track your spending, just that it’s important to do so. Get your bank to print out your passbook (do they still do that?), use pen and paper, use a digital notepad, use a spreadsheet, put everything on your debit/credit card and review the statements, use specialized software, or use some web service… It doesn’t really matter what you use, just that you do it. Why track your spending? Because what we spend our money on is a reflection of our values, so if you want to make sure your spending aligns with your desired values, you have to track your spending. (What your inflows and outflows of money are also helps you reflect on your Money vs Life balance).

What I Use (Normally)

In what is already starting to feel like a past life, I use Microsoft Money to track my spending (as well as my investments, and basically anything related to my personal finances). If you’re not familiar with Microsoft Money, it’s sort of like Quicken, except it doesn’t suck (that’s my personal opinion).

Unfortunately, Microsoft discontinued the software back in 2009, so Microsoft Money is no longer actively developed. When they stopped developing it, I searched all over for an alternative (including purchasing and using Quicken for a while *blurgh*) but in the end, I just kept on using Microsoft Money. The good thing about Microsoft Money though, is that since Microsoft stopped working on it, they’ve made it freely available! This is great, but at the same time, it’s hard for me to recommend anyone start using it as I’m sure at some point, it will stop working on the newest version of windows. (And when that day comes, I’ll either cling on and run it in a VM forever, or go back to my desperate and unfruitful search for an alternative I like).

What I Use During Travel

When I’m travelling, I continue to use Microsoft Money to track everything, but I supplement it with additional tools. There are a few reasons for this:

I like to keep track of spending real time when I travel. Since not every transaction will have a receipt, if I don’t keep track of it during the day, it’s easy to forget some details when I’m trying to log everything in the evening.
I like to keep track in two ways to make sure everything balances and I have an accurate record of the current (foreign) cash I have on hand.
Travel often includes a lot of shared expenses, so it’s a lot easier to share a separate document used for tracking spending than it would be to share my Microsoft Money data.

So, my basic workflow to track spending when I travel involves taking notes on the go (historically with a pen and notepad, but nowadays with Evernote, see the header image for this post), then transcribing things into a spreadsheet at the end of every day. Sometimes, (if mobile data is readily available) I’ll enter data directly into an Excel Spreadsheet from my phone. I keep my spending spreadsheet in Microsoft OneDrive, and Microsoft Excel for Android (and iOS) do a decent enough job for me to enter transactions on the fly, but their offline modes can be finicky, so I usually only do this when I have reliable mobile data.

I tend to (stupidly) build a new tracking spreadsheet from scratch for every trip, but this allows me to customize the spreadsheet as needed, and make tweaks to it based on things I didn’t like the last time around. Examples of things I’ll change up are whether I track the country/city for every transaction (not necessary for trips to a single location), and whether it’s a group trip and I need to track who paid for what and for whom (I use Splitwise for this now, which I’ll write about in the future).

Regardless, the fundamentals of a spreadsheet to track spending are generally the same, so I present to you a basic version for travel that you can download. The rest of this post will be describing the spreadsheet and how you can use it.

Travel-Spending.xlsx

This workbook has 5 worksheets in it:

Transactions
Summary
Cash
Currencies
Payment Accounts

The first worksheet, Transactions, is where all the spending gets entered. Each row represents a transaction, and the values you enter for each column should be pretty self-explanatory. The spreadsheet is filled with some dummy (or not so dummy) data so you can see how everything works.

Column D (“CAD”) should be auto-filled using the formula given. This takes the amount in Column B, along with the currency in Column C, and calculates the total value in Canadian Dollars. The Currency Names (e.g. JPY, TWD, etc) are given in the “Currencies” worksheet.

Payment Account records what was used to make payment for the given transaction. The available options must come from the list given in the “Payment Accounts” worksheet.

Category allows you to categorize your transactions. These categories come from the list (which you can customize) in the “Summary” worksheet. The categories behave in a straightforward manner except for “Transfers”. Transfers do not get included in the spending totals, because Transfers are used for moving money from one payment account to another. An example of this would be loading credit onto a transit card. This is a transfer as the money hasn’t actually been spent, just added to another account. When you use the transit card to pay a transit fare (or to buy a delicious pudding from 7-Eleven), that’s when the money is actually spent.

The “Cash” worksheet is where you can see this in action. Anytime there is a “Transfer” transaction recorded, the spreadsheet looks at the Payee column along with the Payment Account column to determine where the transfer is coming from and going to. For example, a Transfer transaction with a Payee of “EasyCard” and a “Payment Account” of Cash deducts from the cash total, and adds it to the “Loaded” column for “EasyCard”. When “EasyCard” is used as a Payment Account for another transaction, then that spending gets added to the Spent column for the “EasyCard”. This allows you to keep track of your running balance on transit cards (or any other account for that matter). If you find this a little bit confusing, try filtering the Transactions worksheet to only show transactions with Category = “Transfers”, and play around with the numbers. See how the values in the “Cash” worksheet change.

The last thing I’ll note is that with this spreadsheet, I’m using a fixed exchange rate for all the currencies. The reason for this is because I usually convert all the cash I’ll need in one go, therefore I only use one fixed exchange rate. Any transactions I put through a credit card go in as CAD, and I’ll simple wait for the charge to post on my credit card before I know the final cost. I’ll usually add a note in the Notes column for that transaction with regards to how much it was in its original currency.

So that’s about it. I usually get a lot of insight looking at the “Summary” worksheet, and I can use the data from the transactions worksheet to analyse my spending in all sorts of ways (e.g. daily spending average vs remaining cash divided by remaining days). (Not included in this sample spreadsheet, because I thought it was too crude and didn’t want to spend time to clean it up, is a worksheet I have that gives me a summary of spending for each day of the trip).

While this spreadsheet has aspects of it that are specific to travelling, it can definitely be used as a foundation for tracking day to day spending as well.

Does anyone else out there keep track of all their spending? What methods do you use, and do you change it up when you’re travelling?

Tokyo (Day 50): City Views and Shibuya

April 19, 2016

I guess we were really tired last night because we went to bed relatively early and slept in. Being on the go is very tiring, so it’s nice to have a day to just relax. I feel like we haven’t had a day where we kind of just did nothing since Taipei.

Before getting to Tokyo, we planned on doing a couple of day trips out of the city, to Mount Fuji and Yokohama, to maximize our JR Pass before it expired on April 21st. Now, we both agreed that we’re going to scrap those plans and just take it easy in Tokyo. There’s so much to see and so many different neighbourhoods to explore, I think I’ll enjoy that more on this trip. It’s my first time in Tokyo (Tim’s 5th time), and I don’t want to feel rushed. If we don’t see everything (which we won’t), it’s not a big deal. I know we’ll have other opportunities in the future to come back.

That being said, our morning/early afternoon was spent at the apartment working on our blog posts and catching up with things we haven’t had much time for. We started to get hungry and headed out for a late lunch. Tim was craving curry again (when isn’t he?) and wanted to try another Japanese chain called “Go!Go! Curry” that we’ve seen and heard about. Go! Go! Curry is named after a former Japanese baseball player, Hideki Matsui, whose jersey number was 55. The number 5 in Japanese is “Go”, so that’s why it’s called “Go! Go!”. Their hours are also a bit weird too, opening at 10:55 – 21:55 and their birthday is May 5th. They love the 5 theme. Go!Go! Curry has a few locations in NYC as well (what doesn’t NYC have?).

We walked to the Shinjuku location for lunch and had a pork cutlet and chicken cutlet curry (680 JPY $7.90 CAD each). Their curry was a bit different than CoCo’s. The curry was much darker and it had a bit more spice than CoCo’s. Overall, we both enjoyed it and I liked how they give you cabbage. Tim felt like he was cheating on CoCo a bit, especially when we passed by a CoCo close to our apartment on our way home from lunch.

After lunch we headed back to the apartment to finish up our posts. We decided to check out the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building (TMGB) observatory and go to Shibuya. We didn’t end up heading back out until close to 5pm.

We walked to the TMGB which is about a 10 minute walk from our apartment. The observatory on the 45th floor of the building is free for visitors and gives pretty decent views of Tokyo. When we got to the building, there was a line up to go on the elevator. We waited about 10 minutes before taking the elevator up. When we got to the 45th floor, the floor was filled with souvenir stands and a restaurant took up almost half the floor (which blocked one side of the building’s views).

We arrived at a good time since the sun was started to go behind the mountains and we stayed and watched the sun set. While walking around, I spotted a familiar face. It was William! Even though the observatory is a popular tourist sight, what are the chances of running into him in such a large city like Tokyo. We ended up making dinner plans with him and left the observatory once dusk fell on the city.

After taking pictures, we made our way towards Shinjuku Station and headed to Shibuya. The plan was to go to Ippudo for Ramen since Tim and Will were both craving it. According to Google, there were a couple of locations around Shibuya so it was perfect because I wanted to go see the famous Shibuya crossing and see the statute of Hachiko.

When we arrived in Shibuya, the place was crazy busy. It was filled with tourists but it was also rush hour so there were black suits everywhere! Right outside Shibuya Station is a statue of a dog named, Hachiko. His story is that he waited for his owner each day outside of Shibuya Station, and even after his owner passed away, he would still go every day for the next 9 years. This story makes me tear up…

As many of you know, I really wanted a dog while growing up and when I was younger I knew a lot about all the different breeds. SoftBank has a company mascot of a dog that Tim thinks is a good looking dog. I told him that it’s a Japanese dog called an Akita. After reading about Hachiko, it turns out he’s an Akita too. Maybe if we get a dog in the future, it’ll be an Akita and we’ll have to name it Hachiko.

We walked through the crossing twice on our search for the Ippudo in Shibuya. After two failed attempts (thanks, Google Maps), we decided to go to the Ippudo in Ebisu. This is the first Ippudo both Tim and William had ever been to. It’s the location that changed Tim’s life (Tim: hardly Kait: You said it did!). We’ll have to go back to Shibuya to spend more time and look around the stores.

We took the Yamanote line to Ebisu Station (one station from Shibuya) and walked a few minutes to Ippudo. The neighbourhood around Ippudo seemed very residential and quiet and lucky for us there was no line up. Our dinner was nostalgic for both Tim and William and it definitely hit the spot. I really enjoyed the gyoza and the soft boiled egg was cooked perfectly and was really good in the soup. In Fukuoka we got a stamp card because Tim thought we’d be going back to Ippudo more to claim our free bowl of ramen before leaving Japan. I’m not sure if that will actually happen.

After dinner we thought about going back to Shibuya to spend more time, but decided to just save that for another night since it started to get really windy and the breeze was quite cold. We planned on seeing William again on Thursday, when we’ll go to Tsukiji Fish Market in the morning.

We took the train back to the apartment and started planning on going to Tokyo Disneyland tomorrow! This is the only trip “outside of Tokyo” that we kept in our schedule. We both really love Disney, so it’ll be a good day tomorrow.

Steps today: 14,000

Tracking Steps: Google Fit vs Moves

If you’ve been keeping up with Kaitlyn’s Travel Log, you’ll know that she’s been reporting our step count each day. Before we started our trip, I wanted to keep track of our steps throughout our travels. I liked some of the ideas of the Quantified self and figured our step count would be an interesting thing to measure. (I also thought it could be a good angle for our travel blog). Over Christmas and Boxing Day, I kept my eye out for good deals on fitness trackers but I couldn’t find any good sales. I then turned my eye towards fitness tracking apps for my phone.

Here were my requirements (in order of priority):

Not kill my battery life
Track daily steps
Provide export options
Track our locations and display it on a map

After doing some research, I narrowed my list down to two apps:

Google Fit
Moves

Google Fit

Google Fit is Google’s “Fitness Platform” for Android, with the idea that it provides a single place for you to track all your fitness needs. It can be paired up with activity tracking devices (like FitBits), but more importantly for me, it can make use of your phone to perform the activity tracking. Being a Google made app, it makes use of the activity tracking co-processors that are found in some phones now, which should help preserve battery life.

Main screen shows your activity for the day... 0 steps, because my phone has been idle all morning as I worked on this post. — Main screen shows your activity for the day… 0 steps, because my phone has been idle all morning as I worked on this post.

Scroll down and you see the total steps by day (or by week or month). Select a day and it breaks down the activities by session.

Clicking into one of the active sessions shows info about that session, along with a map of the route.

Moves

I tried the Moves App when it first came out on my old Nexus S. It provided activity tracking and also mapped out the locations of those activities. I thought of it like an automated spatial journal. It made it easy for me to look back and remember where I was at any given time. The big problem for me back then though, was that it killed my battery life. I couldn’t get through a day without my phone needing a charge, so I had to uninstall it.

Fast forward to today, and now the Moves app is owned by Facebook. It also makes use of motion co-processors in phones, so it shouldn’t kill the battery. The only other big change I see in the app now is that it has also developed itself into a platform of sorts, and there are numerous companion apps that can make use of the data that Moves is tracking.

Main screen shows your activity for the day, along with a timeline of sorts. Swiping left or right changes the day.

The timeline shows places you went, along with the way you moved from point A to point B.

Selecting a place or a segment of transit opens a map showing the route of the activity or the location of the place you were at. You can trace your steps in the map view going from place to place.

Google Fit vs Moves

Okay, so the main point of this article isn’t to review the apps, but to see how well they’ve been tracking our steps. I wanted to see if their step counts were comparable (i.e. “do the two methods of measurement agree sufficiently closely?”, Altman and Bland) and how best we should be logging and reporting our steps. (So far, we’ve been reporting the average between the two step counts, rounded to the nearest 100 or so).

We’re about 50 days into our trip, and other than a couple days where one app or the other failed (i.e. the background process running on the phone crashed and didn’t restart), both apps have been running smoothly. We have 46 days worth of step counts where both apps were running, and that’s the data I’ll be using.

First, I did a scatter plot with one point for each day. Google Fit on the x-axis and Moves on the y-axis. If their step counts are close, I should expect the points to follow a 45 degree line closely (i.e. x and y values should be very close in value).

So far so good. For the most part, it seems like both apps are doing a reasonable job matching each other step for step, including higher step count days. In order to check this more clearly, I created a second plot. This plot compares the difference in step count vs the average step count for each day. If both apps measure step counts very closely, all the points should fall close to the x-axis. If the difference in step count grows as the total step count increases, then I would expect the plot to deviate from the x-axis as we go further to the right in the plot. Either way, what I’m hoping to see here is no clear pattern with how the difference between the two step counts deviate, regardless of how many steps were taken that day.

Okay, so the difference that we’re looking at here is the Google Fit count subtracted by the Moves count. While things are clustered around the x-axis (i.e. zero difference), it’s a bit more spread out than I would have hoped. The good thing here though, is that there doesn’t appear to be any clear pattern of the difference increasing with the higher step count days. (In fact, the highest couple step count days show very close counts).

Visually inspecting those two graphs, I’m fairly confident the two apps are measuring our step counts in a similar way, and one isn’t way off from the other. With that in mind, what’s the best way for us to report our step counts? We could probably just use one app (and save some battery on my phone), but since I have nothing to determine the accuracy of the step counts, and only know the two are relatively precise, I think my best bet is to continue reporting the average between the two (similar to some of the ideas from “The Wisdom of Crowds” by James Surowiecki, though I guess there is a certain expectation of accuracy for the two counts for this to really help).

With that in mind, I also looked at the standard deviation of the difference in step count… 1185 steps (or about 5% of our average steps per day). Based on that, we’ll continue to use our average step count when reporting our daily steps, but I think we’ll start rounding to the nearest thousand.

Step Summary

If by chance you’ve gotten this far in my post, here’s some extra step related notes on our trip so far (as of April 18).

Total steps: 983,000
What!? We’ll probably hit a million steps today or tomorrow. Not sure how many days it’d take me to walk a million steps back in Vancouver, but I’m pretty sure it’d take more than 50 days. It was pretty exciting for me to see this number, as I have a lot of respect for how big a number one million is.

Average steps per day: 20,000
I’m quite happy about this. We set 20,000 steps per day as our goal, and while we haven’t hit it every day, the fact that our average steps per day is right on target is pretty awesome. It means our higher step days are nicely balancing our lazier days.

Most steps in a day: 44,548
This came pretty early on our trip on Day 4, when we got up early to hike Elephant Mountain in Taipei.

Fewest steps in a day: 10,027
Similar to our average steps per day, I’m quite happy about our fewest steps in a day. 10,000 steps per day (rightly or wrongly) is often given as the recommended number of daily steps for healthy living, so knowing that even our most inactive days reaches this threshold is a good indicator that we’re living a more active lifestyle now than we were before.

I was tempted to hold off on posting this since we’re so close to a million steps, but I figure I may a well post it, and Kaitlyn can say something about reaching a million steps when we actually hit it.

Tokyo (Day 49): Akihabara & Ginza

April 18, 2016

Today was our first full day in Tokyo and I was ready to explore. We decided to go to Akihabara, the Imperial Palace, and Ginza. We took our time waking up and getting ready. It was a sunny and warm morning in Tokyo, so it was nice to just sit and have breakfast at the apartment before heading out.

For lunch we decided to go to a place around the corner from our apartment. We had passed by yesterday and it looked like Marukame Udon in Honolulu (one of my family’s favourite restaurants). There was no English signage but everything inside looked exactly the same (after googling, it turns out it is a Marugame Udon but in the US they call it Marukame). They make their udon fresh in house and also serve tempura, onigiris (no spam masubis here), and inari cafeteria style.

After we sat down, I looked down at my tray and looked around. I had way more tempura on my plate than any of the other Japanese men in the restaurant. Most people only had their bowl of udon and one piece of tempura. I loaded my plate North American style.

After lunch we made our way to Akihabara, which is an area most known for their many electronic stores. But more recently, it’s also become a place where die-hard anime, manga and gaming fans congregate.

The first large building you see from the train station is Yodobashi Camera, which basically sells everything and anything electronic. We spent around an hour there circling each floor to see what they had. If you’re looking for a tripod, they probably have every tripod ever made for you to choose from. Sometimes I think with so much selection in Japan, it makes shopping a lot more difficult (Tim: see “The Paradox of Choice“, by Barry Schwartz). How many choices of electric shavers do you need?

Along with being the electronic area in Tokyo, it’s also referred to as the “hobby” area. We found a store called Mandarake, which is a 7 floor building filled with anime, comics, and toys – both new and second hand. We started on the top floor and worked our way down. There was quite a collection of expensive vintage toys that were interesting to see.

After browsing around for a couple of hours, we made our way towards the Imperial Palace. The Imperial Palace Park is near Tokyo Station in the Chiyoda District and its total area is 3.41 square kilometres. The park is made up of large gravel walkways and green grass patches with perfectly manicured trees. Unfortunately, you aren’t allowed to go on the grass, which makes this park a “no fun park” in my opinion.

After walking through the park we made our way to Ginza, a shopping district. It is home to many high end brands, department stores, and more importantly, the world’s largest Uniqlo (its flagship store). The streets were busier with tourists, some very loud and obnoxious ones (I had to push and shove a bit). Once we found the Uniqlo, we realized that groups of tour buses drop off bus loads of people right in front of Uniqlo (great…).

After going through each floor, we ended up just buying small umbrellas. Most of the clothing we had seen in our many trips to Uniqlos in the last 48 days (Tim: who would have though different Uniqlo locations sell the same thing?) and their sales sections were severely over picked since there’s obviously more people who shop at this location.

When we left Uniqlo, it was raining so we made our way back to Shinjuku for dinner. While lining up for sushi last night, Tim noticed a yakitori (grilled skewer) place beside it with fairly decent prices. We decided to give it a try since we hadn’t had yakiori on this trip yet. The restaurant was on the 2nd floor of the building beside Numakuzo, and when we entered we were surprised to see that the restaurant was quite large inside and full of (mainly) Japanese people.

We ordered a variety of yakitoris: chicken & leek, pork belly, chicken skin, and quail eggs. Besides the skewers, two dishes that I thought were very well done were the “Yokohoma croquette”, which was a mixture of beef and potato (180 JPY each = $2.10 CAD) and their chicken karaage, which was very tender and the batter was very light (380 JPY = $4.45 CAD) . I didn’t take pictures of a lot of our food because the skewers just came as they were cooked and we were really hungry.

We ordered quite a bit of food and everything was delicious. I would go back again if we have a chance. For two drinks, chicken karaage, 2 croquettes, yaki soba and 16 skewers, the bill came to 4,122 JPY after tax ($48 CAD).

After dinner we walked back to the apartment using a different route than usual and ended up walking through where a bunch of clubs and host bars are in Shinjuku. If you’ve watched Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown Tokyo episode, you will probably recognize some of the sights. We passed by the Robot Show which is supposed to be really interesting and very random. But the price per ticket is 8,000 JPY = $93 CAD, which is higher than what we would value watching that show. I think I would watch it for $20 CAD. We also walked past a lot of male host bars with their pictures all over the front of the buildings. Male hosts in Tokyo basically just sit and talk/flatter you while you’re eating dinner or having a drink.

We saw a lot more signage like the ones above on our way home. Tim asked if I learned anything about Tokyo today. I said I didn’t learn anything new because these were all things that I had heard about before coming here. But of course it’s different seeing it first hand. From the octopus porn anime (and other questionable comic books) to countless male host bars, I don’t understand Tokyo’s culture. I feel like if you put a male host bar in Vancouver with similar signage, people would see it as a joke and not take it seriously, but here it’s normal. The first word that comes to mind when I see all these things is that it’s so “weird”, but Tim corrects me and says it’s not weird, it’s just different (Tim’s the culturally empathetic one in our relationship). But to me, different is having to take off your shoes when you try clothes on at a store. Weird/wrong is having multiple comic books entitled “Rape All Girls” in stores (there is no apparent translation error).

Japan’s culture is just different and I don’t think I’ll ever understand it. Specifically, the fact that they have a whole other underbelly of anime porn, lots of prostitution, and hundreds of host bars makes it seem a bit counterintuitive as they want to present you with a certain polite image.

I think most westerners visiting Japan will tell you that Japanese people are extremely polite, everything is orderly and clean. But I also feel like everything is very surface level. A blog Tim reads regularly, called Wait But Why, talks about his experience in Japan (he just stayed in Tokyo) and how as a foreigner (or basically anyone not of 100% Japanese ancestry), there’s an impenetrable wall you can’t get past. Tim showed his cousin, who lived in Tokyo for 7 years this article and he agreed with it. We’ve only been here for 2 weeks and although people are super “nice” and polite, it does feel a bit empty. We both feel that people in Thailand were genuinely nicer and it wasn’t just surface level like it is here. Sure, not everyone in Thailand is super nice but that feels a bit more real, doesn’t it? Not everyone is happy 24/7. They took interest in you as a foreigner and it felt genuine. I guess that’s why Thailand is called “the land of smiles”.

But don’t get me wrong, I’m really enjoying my time in Japan, I appreciate how pleasant everything is, which makes visiting nice. Japan is very nice and pleasant.

Steps today: 22, 500

Osaka/Tokyo (Day 48): Konnichiwa, Tokyo!

April 17, 2016

This morning we woke up earlier to finish packing and to check out of our hotel. I’ll miss all the comforts of that hotel room for the rest of our trip. We were spoiled!

7 Yi-Ma met us in the lobby at 10am to bring us to her church for Sunday Service. The church that 7 Yi-Ma goes to is called Osaka Chinese Presbyterian Church. The congregation is 80% Taiwanese people living in Osaka and the rest are mostly Japanese people. The service is an hour and 45 minutes (a lot longer than a Catholic Mass), and is said in Mandarin and Japanese. It’s no wonder the service is long, because everything has to be repeated twice.

When we walked into the church, the greeter asked 7 Yi-Ma to write down our names and where we’re from so they could introduce us to the congregation at the end of the service. Tim was able to understand the majority of the service and translated bits and pieces of it to me on the spot. It was nice to be part of the service, even though I didn’t understand anything, I’m glad 7 Yi-Ma took us to her church. It felt like a very good community to be a part of and I’m glad that she has that in Osaka. We sat beside Tim’s extended relatives, they are 7 Yi-Ma’s oldest brother’s son. I know, a bit confusing, but they’re related to Tim (Tim: my first cousin, once removed, or more specifically, the oldest brother of my paternal grandma’s second son). Tim’s Dad’s side of the family is quite extensive and seem to be all over the globe.

After church we took the subway back to our hotel since we left our bags there. On the way to the restaurant for lunch, I noticed a cookie counter that Tim mentioned he really liked at Takashimaya, called Yoku Moku. I pointed to it to show him. 7 Yi-Ma saw me pointing to it and Tim told her that I recognized the brand because he told me about it yesterday. Then she b-lined it to their counter and bought us a variety of cookies to take with us home and for our train ride. That was very nice of her, but we also felt bad for pointing it out since she’s already been so generous to us during our time in Osaka.

The cookies are really good. I can see why Tim enjoys them. I just googled Yoku Moku and it looks like you can get them at Neiman Marcus and Shirokiya in Hawaii, so I won’t feel too bad if we eat them all before we get home (Tim: because we go to Hawaii all the time?).

For lunch, 7 Yi-Ma treated us to an unagi lunch. We went to the same restaurant as we did the first night we arrived in Osaka since that restaurant specializes in unagi. The unagi here ranged from 1,500 JPY = $17 CAD to 3,100 JPY = $36 CAD. As Tim mentioned before, 7 Yi-Ma takes her unagi seriously and ordered the three of us the 3,100 JPY box. The set was presented in a square box and was delicious. She told us that you don’t have to eat all the rice, but we both did. We liked to pour more unagi sauce over the rice. They could probably tell we weren’t Japanese when we did that. It’s like people pouring soy sauce over their white rice (Tim: nothing wrong with that :P).

After lunch, we took the subway towards Shin-Osaka Station, our Shinkansen (high speed rail) to Tokyo was leaving at 3:16pm. 7 Yi-Ma took the train with us until we had to transfer. I felt sad saying goodbye to her as we waved goodbye from the train. I think having to say goodbye to family on this trip has made me very emotional.

We got to Shin-Osaka with about 45 minutes to spare before our train left for Tokyo. I walked around the station looking at the bento box counter, which serves really good looking train food. Unfortunately, we were really full from lunch and we had cookies to eat so we didn’t get a bento. William had mentioned these specific boxes because there is a set that comes with a ceramic bowl that you can keep.

Our train ride was just under 3 hours because our train made quite a few stops along the way. It went by quickly since I got to watch the Amazing Race and the Mindy Project. Then as usual, I fell asleep until we got to Tokyo Station.

Tokyo Station wasn’t as crazy as I imagined it to be. Maybe my expectations of the crowds here are very high so when we got there it was manageable, and I suppose it was a Sunday, and not a weekday. We transferred to the Chuo Line to get to Shinjuku Station. We booked an apartment on Airbnb that is about a 7 minute walk from Shinjuku Station. We followed the host’s instructions and didn’t have any problems finding the place. It’s amazing that you can go from an area with thousands of people to an area where it’s clearly more residential and is very quiet within a couple of blocks.

When we got into the apartment, everything was exactly like the pictures and it is very clean. The location is really central considering we are only paying $85 CAD/night (before taxes and fees, the list price seems to be around $110 CAD/night normally, but we booked last minute and the room was still available so the price probably dropped). Most hotels in central Tokyo are closer to $200/night. The apartment also has a washing machine, which is great. We won’t have to hand wash while we’re here. The host also provided a portable cellular wif hotspot, which we can bring around with us while in Tokyo. (Tim: Speeds aren’t so great though).

We settled in and I looked up some sushi restaurants in the Shinjuku area. Since coming to Japan, we haven’t really had much sushi since there’s so many other options. I felt like having sushi today and wanted to try a conveyor belt restaurant. Unlike North American conveyor belt sushi restaurants, the ones in Japan seem very popular amongst locals and they serve quality sushi.

We headed out towards the part of Shinjuku where all the action is and searched for Numakuzo. When we found the restaurant, there was a line up (it was around 8:30pm), we waited about 10 minutes before being seated. I actually don’t think I’ve been to a conveyor belt sushi place before. I only remember that Daimatsu (where Ebisu is now) in Richmond used to have one a long time ago.

The restaurant was filled with Japanese people and tourists (I see that it’s been listed in Lonely Planet). When we sat down, there weren’t that many plates going around as I guess we came at a really busy time so the sushi chefs weren’t keeping up. If you don’t see something you like you can order it directly from the sushi chef. After you’re done, the waitress comes and counts the number of plates you have. Overall, I thought the sushi was really good. My favourite was the Bluefin Otoro (fatty tuna) which melted in our mouths. It was our most expensive piece at 520 JPY = $6 CAD. You can get this at some restaurants in Vancouver for about $12-$15 per piece.

We ate more than I expected and it worked out to be about $53 CAD, which isn’t too bad considering we had some pretty special pieces of fish, like the Bluefin Otoro. We walked back towards the apartment and stopped by Lawson’s to buy some yogurt for breakfast tomorrow morning.

My first impression of Tokyo is that the city is huge – taller buildings, bright lights, super wide cross walks and lots of people. I feel very insignificant in a city like this. Even though Shinjuku was very busy (around the few streets that we walked through), it didn’t bother me as much as I thought. I think it’s because it’s like an organized chaos and there’s no one pushing you out of the way to get past you (like in Hong Kong). We’ll see how I feel tomorrow, maybe we’ll see more tour groups.

Steps today: 10,500

Osaka (Day 47): Shopping & Okonomiyaki

April 16, 2016

Today was our last day in Osaka and we didn’t have any day trips planned. We decided to take it easy, go shopping, and have okonomiyaki (since we tried Hiroshima’s style already) for dinner. The morning started off with us watching the news about the effects of the 7.3 magnitude earthquake in Kumamoto. They showed the area on the map where the active fault is and it stretched north to Beppu, where we were last week. We’re very lucky!

We headed out and went for a casual lunch at a restaurant that I had seen around other cities, called Nakau. There was one right across the street from our hotel. It was a casual and inexpensive restaurant that serves rice and noodle dishes. Similar to a lot of other casual restaurants in Japan, you have to order and pay at the kiosk and print your ticket out to give to the waitress when you sit down. The food was good. I would go back to Nakau again. While eating, we were talking about how eating in Japan can be very inexpensive if you go to places like this. No wonder there were so many school aged boys here. It’s cheaper than eating at McDonald’s.

After our lunch, we stumbled upon Kuromon Ichiba Market, which is fairly close to Namba Station. This market is mainly a food market full of fresh seafood and fruit stalls. Since we just ate lunch, we just browsed and observed some of the prices for sushi and gawked at the crazy prices of fruit. Although I really like Japanese food, I don’t know if I could live in Japan and not have access to cheaper fresh fruit. We have been in normal grocery stores (vs. just the high end department stores) and their apples are still about $2.50 CAD each and bananas are around $1.50 CAD each (those were the cheapest prices I saw).

After going through the market, we started to make our way towards Shinsaibashi. On our way there, we came across a large department store near Namba Station called, Takashimaya. The exterior of the building looked very nice so we decided to go inside.

Before leaving the hotel, I was looking online to see if there were any Osaka specific items to buy. I found out that Glico (the company that makes Pocky (Tim: and delicious curry)) has a high end line of Pocky sticks called, Baton d’or (which means “Golden Stick” in French, but obviously it sounds fancier if it’s said in French). They are only sold in two department stores in Osaka. (I later found out they have a location in Kyoto and Fukuoka now… at least they don’t have any in Tokyo (Tim: why is that a good thing?)). I wasn’t going to actively go out of my way to search for them but when we came across Takashimaya, I remembered they sold them there so I wanted to check it out.

I love B1 (Basement floor) in every train station and department store in Japan because it’s full of delicious food. They always have a great selection of take out food as well as perfect looking desserts and goodies. If I were going home from Japan this trip, I think I would buy a lot of my souvenirs from here. But since that’s not the case, we just browsed. While we browsed, we found Baton d’or! There was a line up of mostly Japanese customers buying basket full of them. When we got closer, we saw that each box of 20 sticks were 500 JPY = $5.90 CAD. For the price of a normal box of Pocky here (which is usually around 100-120 JPY), it’s about 5 times the price.

Being a Pocky enthusiast, I felt like it was my duty to try at least one box. We lined up at a good time since the line up only continued to snake around the corner after we got in the line. We (I) decided to try three flavours: Strawberry, Uji matcha and Sicilian lemon. So why are they so special? Apparently the ingredients they use to make these pocky are all fresh ingredients (as they have a fairly short expiry, about a month) and they use real butter. Oh, and their flavours are seasonal and location specific (Asians love exclusivity, and I guess I’m a sucker for it as well).

We walked around and shopped for the next couple of hours before dinner time. We went into a store called, Tokyu Hands, which is a store that I’ve seen throughout Japan and even in Taipei. The Osaka location had 7 levels and we went to each floor to check things out. They have a full range of items, from fancy backpacks to home hardware tools to stationery.

Before finding the restaurant, we walked past the arcade to see if there were any men dancing on the Dance Evolution machine. William showed us a video of a man (who appeared to be in his 50’s) dancing really well and even doing the moves while facing the opposite way (so obviously he had them memorized). We didn’t have any luck seeing any dancers yesterday, but today there were about 3-4 men lined up to dance. These men had backpacks and towels with them. It was sort of like they just danced there to get a workout. We went back a couple of times and watched different guys. The guy who could do the moves without looking at the screen was sitting waiting for his turn, but we must have missed him because when we went back after dinner he was gone. Tim took some videos of them, they were all really good. I guess you have to be dancing in “master mode” if you want to dance in front of a crowd (there’s circle of people watching outside).

William recommended a place tucked away in one of the side streets in the area, which was a good suggestion because so many restaurants on the main drag had long line ups (Saturday night!). After admiring the dancers, we found the okonomiyaki restaurant. We got a seat right away and ordered two okonomiyakis – pork and octopus (800 JPY each = $9.45 CAD). They were smaller than the ones in Hiroshima which is why we felt like we could each have our own this time.

I enjoyed this okonomiyaki more than I did in Hiroshima. There’s less frills to this one and I liked how everything is mixed in and not separate layers. But perhaps I’m just used to eating more Osaka style okonomiyakis since that’s what they would make in Vancouver at Japanese restaurants that serve okonomiyaki.

After dinner, we had one last look at the arcade to watch the dancers and we made our way back to the hotel. We had to pack tonight as we’re heading to Tokyo tomorrow. It was nice being able to stay in one (very comfortable) place for 7 nights. Hopefully our Airbnb is a good one. It should be based on the reviews (*fingers crossed*).

I packed up my backpack and it’s looking pretty full. We’ll have to come back to Japan on another trip so I can bring home all the yummy snacks and skin care products (Tim: or buy them at home/order them online). My cousin, who is living in Melbourne (who knows her cosmetics), asked me to look for a Biore UV sunscreen (it won a cosmetic award in Japan in 2014). Ever since Taiwan, I’ve been looking at the product to compare prices every where we went (I didn’t see it in Seoul). Since this particular cream is made in Japan, it’s slightly cheaper here than in Taiwan. Basically, every time we went shopping I’ve stared at their line of sun screen products and analyzed how much I should buy for myself and if I could fit it in my bag. I think Tim officially hates this product (but is also an expert in the whole product line) because of how many time I’ve gone into a drugstore to look for it (Tim: easily 20+). Having bought all the requested products and a few for myself and my sister, I will (try to) stop looking at them and comparing prices (seems to fluctuate a lot).

Steps today: 16,600

Kobe (Day 46): Kobe Beef and an Earthquake

April 15, 2016

For our last day trip out of Osaka, we decided to go to Kobe. I’ve always wanted to try Kobe beef in Kobe and to be honest, that’s basically all I associated with the city (I know, I’m an ignorant North American). The only thing I did some research on (half an hour before we left) was where we should have lunch so we could try Kobe beef. Once I found some options and Tim starred their locations on Google maps, we headed for Osaka Station.

The train ride to Sannomiya Station took about 30 minutes from Osaka Station. We arrived perfectly around lunch time and decided to go to the Kobe beef restaurant called, Ishidaya. The restaurant was located about 5 minutes by foot from the station, but we had a bit of trouble finding it, so it took a bit longer. The restaurant is tucked away from the main road and on the second floor of a narrow building. It was good that we decided to try it at lunch as many restaurants offer much more reasonable pricing than during dinner service.

When we walked up the stairs a woman opened the door expecting our arrival. We later figured out that every time someone opens the door downstairs there’s a subtle chime that goes off, so the waitress is prepared to greet diners. Ishida prepares their Kobe beef teppanyaki style, which was perfect because Tim and I have always talked about going to a teppanyaki place together. Tim used to go more frequently while on business with his American coworkers (Tim: Whatever you’re imagining right now about teppanyaki places in the States is probably accurate). But something told me this experience would be a different one than an American teppanyaki restaurant (mostly we wouldn’t be seeing any cheesy flat top tricks) (Tim: to be fair though, those tricks can be fun :P).

After looking at the menu, we decided we would try two different Kobe beef sets. One of them was sirloin (150g for 5,800 JPY = $68 CAD) and the other was a round steak cut (130g for 3,300 JPY = $39 CAD). Each of the lunch sets came with salad, grilled vegetables, rice (we upgraded to fried rice for 500 JPY = $6 CAD, miso soup, pickled vegetables, dessert and coffee/tea. The whole meal was delicious and eating the sirloin Kobe beef was amazing. It definitely did melt in your mouth as a lot of people say. The round cut Kobe beef was still very tender but it was a lot more lean than the sirloin, so it didn’t melt in our mouths as much…

After we were done, we left extremely satisfied. Our plan for the day in Kobe was to just walk around and explore a bit. Kobe has a different feel compared to other cities we’ve been to in Japan. We noticed there were a lot more ethnically diverse restaurants in the city and some of their street had a European feel to them.

We walked towards the Kitano area of Kobe, which is a historical area set up on a hill. The Kitano area is full of former foreign residences and is a quaint little area to walk around. About 5 minutes up the hill is an observatory area where you can get nice views of the city and the Port of Kobe.

Along our way towards Kitano, we found that the city is not only diverse in its buildings and restaurants, it also has various places of worship besides Buddhist or Shinto shrines. Most notably we passed by Kobe Mosque and a Synagogue. Being one of Japan’s major ports to the west, it makes sense that there is much more diversity here than the rest of Japan.

We made our way down the hill back to the more central area of Kobe. Our next stop was to walk through Chinatown, which is only one of three designated Chinatowns in Japan. I was craving Chinese BBQ meats (duck, cha-su, and roasted pork) on rice, so I was hoping to see some on our way through. Granted we only walked through one of the main streets within Chinatown (Tim: there really was only 1 main street), we only saw the same peking duck wraps and steamed buns over and over again (none looked very appetizing).

After walking through Chinatown, we continued to head towards the Port of Kobe. At the port, there is a memorial for the earthquake that happened in Kobe in 1995, which was one of Japan’s worst earthquakes in the 20th century (magnitude of 6.9). Walking around the port was really nice since it was a sunny and clear day. We just sat close to the water and chilled out for a while.

We eventually headed back towards Sannomiya Station, but this time we decided to walk below the train tracks as I read there are a lot of restaurants and stores there. In particular, there was a gyoza only restaurant, called Hyotan, that is supposed to be quite good, so we wanted to go there before heading back to Osaka.

Before finding the gyoza place, we stopped by a bakery called, Pablo, which specializes in cheese tarts. We’ve seen this place around Japan as well as in Taipei and they almost always have a huge line up. I wanted to try one and this location only had about 5 people in line, so we decided to buy a tart to share. Compared to everyone else in line, who were buying dozens or them or cakes, we had the smallest order. The tart was very well done and the cheese is like a fluffy Japanese cheesecake, I can see why people would line up for them. But at the same time, I think Asian tourists go crazy for any dairy product in Japan because they don’t have many dairy based desserts or products in Hong Kong, for example.

We finally found the gyoza place. There was no big sign that says “Hyotan” so it was a bit difficult to find. It’s a very casual looking restaurant, full of Japanese businessmen (there were no other female diners) having a beer with a plate of gyozas after work.

The gyozas were hot and juicy. We read after that they are known for their red miso paste for dipping. Luckily, I wanted to try it in my sauce, Tim on the other hand didn’t use any (oh well). The waitress did not speak English and was trying to tell us that the minimum order was one per person in Japanese (although there are signs on the wall in English, we didn’t see them). Tim’s Mandarin came in handy when she first said no English, then she started to speak Mandarin to him. It was an interesting experience to eat with a bunch of businessmen after work. Tim always asks if I feel okay going into a place like that when it’s all men. I think he feels more uncomfortable on my behalf than I actually do.

We took the train back to Osaka Station and headed straight to Dotonburi (via JR Namba Station) to meet William at around 8pm for a late dinner (snack for us).

Last night, we were watching Anthony Bourdain’s episode in Osaka and wanted to try kushikatsu (deep fried skewers). We learned they are unique to Osaka, and it just so happened that William said he wanted to try them too before we even suggested it. We found a place in Dotonburi that was pretty busy (seems like a good place to start). Tim and I shared a combo of skewers and ordered a different ones to try. They give you a plate of cabbage that you can dip in the tonkatsu-like sauce. At these restaurants, there are communal dipping sauces at each table and there is no double dipping allowed since they don’t change the dip after each customer.

The majority of skewers are 120 JPY = $1.40 CAD and could go up to 360 JPY = $4.25 CAD for more speciality items. My favourite kushikatsu were the quail eggs. It was a good experience and I was happy we got to try it in Osaka. However, this would not be a very healthy thing to eat every day after work.

After a heavy dinner, we went to the melonpan ice cream bun truck. We had told William about it last time we met in Kyoto and he wanted to try. We got one and he agreed, it was very delicious. This dessert makes Tim very happy.

We said our goodbyes and said we’d meet up again in Tokyo. William was leaving for Tokyo tomorrow and we’ll be there a day after him. I like hanging out with William because he knows a lot about what restaurants to go to or what kind of food to eat in each city as he’s been to Japan quite a few times.

We walked back to our hotel and relaxed for the rest of the night. I wasn’t able to finish my blog post for tonight because I was getting a bit tired. While I was sitting at the desk, I heard a slight banging noise and felt a bit of movement. I asked Tim if he felt that and if it was an earthquake. He said he didn’t feel anything (while laying in bed) and it was probably nothing. So I thought I was just imagining things since there was a large earthquake in Kumamoto the day before with a magnitude of 6.4. (Tim: It might of been a pre-tremor that hit the area just before midnight.)

At about 1:25am, I got into bed and we turned off the lights to sleep. Then all of a sudden, everything started to shake really hard and you can feel the building swaying and hear the structure of the building making large creaking noises. Since we have two double beds, I stayed in my bed for a little bit thinking the shaking would stop soon. But then after it continued to shake even harder, I went to Tim and hugged him until it stopped. The shaking seemed to have lasted for about 30 seconds (Tim: possibly felt longer because the building continued to sway for a bit). It was the longest earthquake I had experienced, and being on the 18th floor, the amount of sway in the building was unsettling. (Tim: This was the first earthquake where I think felt the 2 distinct waves you learn about in elementary school. One big shake, followed by lighter shaking and swaying in the building, followed by another bigger shake that made the building sway for a while.)

We turned on the Japanese news and tried to go online for more information about what just happened. We found out there was a 7.3 magnitude earthquake again in Kumamoto (which is about 700 km south of Osaka). The fact that we felt such a strong tremor was crazy since the epicenter was so far away. We are lucky that we left Kyushu (island where Kumamoto is) last week. Fukuoka and Beppu are both on Kyushu island and Beppu, specifically, is in an area more affected by the earthquake. Since the big earthquake on Thursday (which they now know was a pre-tremor for the earthquake last night), there has been over 100 earthquakes of 3-5 magnitude in the Kumamoto region, many higher than what we have experienced in Vancouver.

As we’re heading east in the next couple of days, hopefully we won’t experience any more tremors or earthquakes while we’re here. I was scared and a bit shaken up last night. Thankfully, Tim and I had already left the area most affected last week, and are okay.

Steps today: 24,500