Ladies and Gentlemen, after a long week (full of 7 days), here I am to write about life changing, reality altering, heart thumping, inception inducing, belly wobbling (ok am running out of these adjectives now) - trip to Japan! *drumrolls*
By the way did I mention our Noodles adventure on our 1st day in Japan? Ahhhh! Old age has just started to catch-up I guess. We visited this place on 3rd floor of a random building in Shinjuku and ordered vegan noodles (Fun fact - It was a Halal place serving vegan food. Animals would be ROFLing in heaven). Now we decided to order 2 normal noodles and 1 with a customized spice level of 4. I have decided to use some pictorial liberties to give you some feels and chills about what we experienced to become the most experienced Japanese Indians to ever come out of Japan. Some of us even championed the art of using chopsticks :D
Back to the above image, the confidence of conquering spice level 4 comes from our Indian DNA (after all we belong to the land of spices & Kamasutra *ahem*). So one of our dear friends took the lead in sacrificing himself. He burnt to ashes and even after a round of resurrection he could spit fire from his mouth and smoke from his @$$. I wonder what spice level 10 would do to humankind.
After all of this, we decided to plan another 3-4 hours of the day and the question was what next. The natural answer was we head back to our rooms and sleep (still recovering from jet lags). However Pikachu almighty had some other plans - as soon as we were about to reach the station entrance, one of our friends saw a beautiful pier by the river (Azumabashi Pier) and my dear friends this is how our heart conquers our mind and body. We instantly decided that this was the place of our calm in the storm, our redemption, our water in the coconut (ok am running out of adjectives again). It was indeed a beautiful walk and one of my biggest learning from such experiences in the times of google, planning, AI itineraries etc. is to keep our eyes and mind open - you never know when you would stumble upon a place you never expected to visit. This is the place where we realized one more fact about Japan - there is no dust - either on the roads, or on walkways. Such AQI can be dangerous to health if your lungs are not used to such levels of pure oxygen.
Finally, we decided that we will visit the Akihabara Electric town for the evening. This is the holy grail for all the game loving, anime loving, electronics loving people. There are muti storey shops on anime movies, games, souvenir & porn *ahem*. This area looks straight out of an anime movie too - tall buildings, bright neon lights, large billboards and people walking their way away from obesity.
Another fun fact about Japan - Due to limited real estate, they have constructed stores, cafes, restaurants all in tall vertical buildings. So there is a chance that there would exist an awesome bar on the 12th floor of a building. There is no way to even know about these places apart from the boards (often in Japanese) at the entrance of each building and of course Google map listings.
There are many Cosplay bars too in this area where girls dress up in some themes like anime, outer space etc. and engage with guests in a role playing manner. We did not visit these - not our cup of tea (or sake). Instead we hit a jackpot with a bar on 5th floor of some building - the Beer pong bar grove. Due to a weekday, we had the entire place to us and this bar had karaoke, jenga and dart games. What more would the boys need than all of these with drinks. We sang our heart out and played dart like the great Dart Vader!
Happy and tipsy, we navigated the metro trains again (like a magic maze) and reached our Airbnb with a mandatory stopover at seven eleven. Every day, we would visit seven eleven, or family mart at least 5-6 times - there was an odd satisfaction of just being there and checking out all the stuff they sold. Back to our rooms, we continued with our sessions about politics, world and life in general and then we called it a day.
That's the end of day 2. Damn! I thought I would finish this in 2 parts but I may have to make it like an entire season with 6 parts. Will be back soon *hold your Sake*
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