#50 | Tokyo, Japan

Japan has always been on my bucket list to travel to. When Aashna and I were booking a trip to visit her family in India, she found a flight that would allow for us to spend 24 hours in Tokyo, giving us a taste of what the city has to offer. I've always been drawn to the fashion, food, culture and sights that I've seen online and heard about. After spending a week or two deciding whether we should book a trip back in November, we pulled the trigger and started to plan on how we wanted to spend our time in the city.

We watched multiple videos and read lists and decided to just try to take in what the city had to offer as 24 hours really wasn't a lot of time to explore the city. This led us to spend all of our time in Shibuya and Harajuku, they had a lot of restaurants and shops that we wanted to pop into. We arrived in the city around 4pm that day and wanted to visit as many stores as we could before they closed. We popped our heads into a bunch of stores like Don Quijote Megastore, Supreme, GIP Store, Blue Blue Japan, The North Face and more. Here we got to take a look at nifty home items and fashion aficionados putting their outfits together. Fashion was really crazy out here, everyone looked laid back but the pieces they wore were intentional and thoughtful.

After all of that shopping, we had to rest our legs and grab a bite to eat. We knew we had to find some sushi and ramen. After viewing multiple blogs and knowing that Aash preferred a chicken broth, we found ourselves at Afuri ordering ramen from a machine and sitting at the bar with a full kitchen right in front of our eyes in Harajuku (this restaurant now exists in Richmond and Portland). The unique thing about this ramen was that they incorporate yuzu in the broth giving it a nice citrus taste. Other meals in this short amount of time included very impressive sushi (both on a conveyer belt and at the airport) and a bubble tea joint to get our caffeine fix to keep us going.

At this point we roamed the busy streets to people watch and make it back to our hotel. We stopped into random businesses, window shopped and stopped at the Starbucks back in Shibuya to watch the world's busiest crosswalk in action. I think Shibuya Crossing is a solid representation of what Tokyo is - safe, busy, organized and entertaining. After gazing at the sights, we were ready for bed. We took a five hour rest, wandered down the streets of Tokyo, headed to Narita airport to do some more shopping and then we were off to visit the family in Mumbai.

I'm dreaming of the day we get to return!

Yours Truly