The Next Adventure

The next morning, we got hot meat bao and pastries from the 7-Eleven next to the hotel. As mentioned in a lot of Japan travel videos, convenience stores like Lawson, 7-Eleven and Family Mart are everywhere . In fact, outside our hotel at Universal City, there were two Lawsons and a 7-Eleven across from each other and another Lawson inside the hotel itself. They sell almost everything, hot and cold food, beer, snacks, toiletries, umbrellas, raincoats, etc.; almost every store had an ATM and they are open 24 hours. Free coffee from the hotel lounge completed our breakfast before we checked out at 10 am. We stored our two suitcases in the hotel lobby, and took off for more shopping and some sightseeing. The plan was to return for our luggage at night to take the train our next hotel when it is not so crowded. We decided to head toward Nippori Fabric Town to get the fabric we saw on our earlier trip to Tokyo. Unfortunately we were not aware that most of the stores were closed on Sund...

The area around our capsule hotel was interesting. We noticed a lot of Korean restaurants, a lot of young people walking around, shopping or standing in line for street food or for a table in small restaurants. We did not feel like eating Korean food, so Laurel googled some local restaurants with good reviews. I wanted to see the Godzilla building, so we just meandered towards that area. And then, we saw it! We found a well known ramen restuarant chain, Ichiran Ramen, for dinner. It was a very small place in the basement of a building, about 14 seats total. We ordered from the kiosk using the English menu, paid, and stood in line. We were given a paper form to mark how we want soup and the texture of our ramen, then waited for about 10 mins until two individual booths were available. At our personal booth, we gave our paper tickets and form to the server who then closed the bamboo flap in front of us after giving us a glass for water from the faucet at the left of the booth and our...

After a very nice breakfast at the Comfort Hotel in Himeji, we checked out to return to Tokyo via the Sanyo Shinkansen. This time, instead of using Klook and paying the 10% service fee, I decided to get tickets directly at Himeji Station which had a Shinkasen stop and was not as crowded as a Tokyo station. I could have purchased the tickets at a kiosk, but the machines did not take credit cards and I was short on cash. Went over to the Shinkansen ticket office instead, got a number, and wait about 10 minutes to be called. The service person at the counter spoke English and gave me tickets for the next train, with two seats next to each other. Best of all there was no service fee and they accepted my credit card. As we waited for our bullet train, I took photos of various Shinkansen that stopped at our platform, including the cute Hello Kitty Shinkansen that attracted a lot of photographers. Our trip from Himeji to Tokyo took about 3.5 hours, with a transfer in Shinagawa to the ...

Himeji was on my bucket list, in particular, Himeji Castle which is a great building in the Forge of Empires online game that I play regularly. I have a goal to visit as many great buildings as I can, in real life. Himeji was a relatively short train ride from Osaka. The day before we checked out of the Park Front Hotel Universal City Osaka, we took our luggage to the Sagawa Luggage Service desk located inside the hotel itself. This time around, we have an additional large suitcase, bought in Kyoto for the Japanese stuff, kimonos and Universal Studio souvenirs that we have picked up. The suitcases will be going directly to Tokyo Bay Hotel near Tokyo Disneyland where we will stay for 3 days. We arrived in Himeji train station and walked to our hotel nearby, the Comfort Hotel Himeji. This is a modern hotel, clean and simple, in the business district. After the crowds in Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka, Himeji felt very quiet and peaceful. We checked in, dropped our bags and immediately went to ...

We slept in, since we were up late at Universal Studios yesterday. In the morning, we could see lines forming at the entry to Universal Studios. Today, we explored Osaka and tried some of its iconic food. We took the train from Universal City station to downtown Osaka. We did some research and found a very highly rated okonomiyaki restaurant. Reviewers warned that it was a very small restaurant (which was typical in Japan) and to expect to wait. We managed to find the unassuming place via GoogleMaps. We sat on a bench outside to wait; a waitress came out with menus so we could order ahead since the place was supposed to be closing soon. I ordered the seafood okonomiyaki while Laurel had the shrimp. We both added noodles (the modanyaki) since we were hungry. After about 30 minutes, we were invited into the tiny restaurant, seated at the counter with about 6 seats only. The okonomiyaki was cooked right in front of us. We were able to move over to a table for two with its own grill, ...