Next Country - Japan!

Before this world trip, if you were to ask the kids which country they most wanted to visit, they would have definitely have said Japan. This is largely because of the color-infused influences of Pokemon, Nintendo and Anime. And all those things are certainly there, as well as some things the kids did not expect. 

A couple of things we learned:

1) We really didn’t need a tour company to arrange things for us here. We continued with Asia Highlights for this tour, and while it was nice to have our hotels and tours booked, we found we really didn’t need our hands to be held every step of the way.

2) There were loads of Americans here! We had not seen so many Americans in one place since we left the US nearly 6 months prior. 

3) Lucy was no longer a novelty. This was a tremendous relief to her. 

4) There are too many tourists. Nearly every site was just exploding with people. Now, they were all well-behaved and gave space and consideration everywhere, so there was grace in that. But, I never felt like I was finding anything either. 

5) Japan is shockingly cash-based. During our time in China, we learned our ATM card had expired, whoops! This was not a big deal up to this point because most places just took credit card. China was almost cash-less. However, Japan was proving to be otherwise, especially with food at markets, but also with some service-type things (i.e. luggage transfer between cities). 

6) Restaurants were surprisingly challenging for a family of five. Many that we found needed prior reservations (including food ordered in advance), were extremely expensive, or were more like bar-stool two person seating. We ate at 7-Eleven or mall food courts, a lot.

7) In Japan, 7-Eleven is actually pretty awesome.

8) Every hotel provided pajamas! 

9) Toilets in Japan are a thing of wonder and beauty!!! Every hotel, airport, public space and even every 7-Eleven had a state-of-the-art toilet seat. Heated seats, cleaning mechanisms with pressure control, auto-flushing, dryers. Some even lit up when you walked into the room.

We loved them so much, we even tried to figure out how to bring one back. They are truly next-level. 

As a traveling family, we were starting to get a little tired at this point of our trip. We were six months in, and it was getting hard to get overexcited about anything.

However, we enjoyed our time in Japan even though I suspect I would have liked it more should we have ventured off the well-trodden tourist route.