Joe Rodin Has A Blog

It is incredibly difficult to make a top 10 list in the heat of the moment. Almost every day on the trip I found something I loved, so by the end of my trip, there'd be many items from the early part of the journey that'd be missing from the list. Now that I've given myself a few weeks to decompress and look back on the trip as a whole, I've come up with a top 10: 10. Sapporo Is it fair to write down an entire city? This is my list, so I say yes! Sapporo was tied for the shortest stay with Nagoya, both of which lasting only 19 hours, so the way I see it, you can do what I did in Sapporo in a single day trip. The three main tourist attractions in the city are all grouped very close together, Odori Park was a beautiful snow covered stretch, plenty of shopping and food to go around as well. Sapporo is at the top of my list for cities I want to see again, mostly based on that I wasn't able to spend much time there. Sapporo TV Tower, Clocktower, and Government O...

January 21. Instagram Three options on the table: Yokohama and tall buildings, DisneyLand Tokyo, or $300 Evisu Jeans. I left it to a public vote on Facebook, and conveniently when I'm going to bed my friends are all waking up, and with overwhelming support, DisneyLand Tokyo won. Honestly, having slept on it overnight, I was convinced I was going to Disney, because my spouse hates Disney, so if I come back to Japan with her, we can do the other two, but definitely not Disney. It's free for me to hop on the JR Train to make it to DisneyLand Tokyo, whereas the hotel's shuttle bus would take an extra 20 minutes and cost $20. Done and easy. I arrived at Disney early because it doesn't matter what time of year it is, there's always a line waiting to get inside. When I arrived for day of tickets, I was maybe only the 20th person in line, but there was easily 1,000 people already waiting to enter the gates. Everyone had blankets, snacks, and vinyl mats to sit down on ...

January 20. Instagram My flight back to Tokyo leaves Naha Airport at 8:00am, so I'm basically on the first monorail train in the morning, and I'm nowhere near the only person on this train to the airport. Security at the airport moved very fast, but they requested to take a closer look at my backpack because they couldn't determine what was in one of the pockets. I told them it was keychains, and a lot of them. Every place I enjoyed, I bought a keychain, and mostly stuck to a three part criteria: It looks like the place I visited.  It's attraction specific, and can't be bought from any old store. It says the name of the attraction or city. It doesn't need to perfectly fit this criteria, but 2/3 would be preferred at a minimum. In total, I bought something like 30 keychains, and stuffed them all in the same pocket of my backpack. Run that through an X-Ray machine and it looks like Freddy Krueger has been compacted into my bag. When I opened the pock...

January 8. Instagram Today is my last day in Tokyo until the end of the trip, when I come back to Tokyo for 2 days and fly back to Boston. This is also going to be the last day I have with Vivian, as we'll be slitting up tomorrow morning, but also this morning, we're moving in different directions, as I have tickets to the Ghibli Museum. The one downside to the Ghibli museum is that no photos are allowed here, but there's so much art everywhere. Books after books after books, exhibits galore, and every room seems to have some kind of film reel running, but best of all, there's a theater in the basement playing a movie that can only be seen at the Museum. The film is short and based on the story Nezumi no Sumo . The cafe had exclusive beer as well, and overall I really enjoyed this museum, even if everything they were selling in the giftshop was a bit overpriced. I feel bad that I don't have more photos to share, because this took up a good few hours of the mor...