Japan — Our first Eddie Jet Set Trip
We’ve only just got over the post Japan blues and 6 weeks out it’s probably about time to come to terms with the fact that we are no longer in Japan. So, as time does heal all wounds we finally feel ready to share a little about our trip with you.
So what the heck did we get up to?
We dined.
Oh boy did we dine. At a new Izakaya every night.
Before we went to Japan, we thought Izakaya was just a fancy Japanese style restaurant, but they are actually just Japanese pubs. Pub with the best kind of pub feeds. We’d sub out a chicken parmi for a katsu sando any day.
Our pub highlight was an evening in Nagasaki, where the chef chatted away to us in Japanese all night. We had no idea what he was saying, but everyone sitting on the nearby barstools were chuckling away with him. We can only guess that he was taking digs at us — especially when he served up a soup to Lachie (who is not a seafood guy, but props to him for being adventurous), used a skewer to scrape at a little piece of meat and said “eat this!”. Just as Lachie popped it in his mouth, the chef pointed to his very wide eyes and said “fish eye!”.
Outside of the Izakayas, other food highlights were:
- Okinomikayi in Tokyo
- The fluffiest pancakes EVER in Kanazawa
- Making our very own ramen in Osaka
- All the other ramens we ate (we averaged a ramen every 3 days)
- A crazy yum bakery we stumbled across in Osaka that had brie and cranberry baguettes
- Parklet – Aussie and Japanese vibes all in one. The interiors though. Watch this reel we made there.
We walked.
On our first day in Tokyo we did about 23,700 steps EACH. Adding up to almost 100,000 steps between 5 of us!
The step count only went up from there. We walked and walked, with the occasional bus and metro-ride too of course, stopping in at convenience stores along the way for DIY smoothies, fried chicken snacks, Asahi’s and plum wine.
We explored gardens.
If there’s one thing that the Japanese do well, and let’s be real they do a lot of things well, it’s gardens.
The immaculate details, the ancient trees, the daily care.
We were very lucky to experience these gardens during Spring, with a few cherry blossoms blooming late towards the end of the season for us. We know that there is a lot of hype around cherry blossoms, and rightly so, but nobody prepared us for the azaleas. They were BLOOMING. We could happily spend hours and use up a good quota of our daily steps in these gardens, and we did just that.
This reel we made for Little Tienda will take you to Mifuneyama Rakuen, Saga Prefecture and on a swan boat ride in Inokashira Park, Tokyo.
We found cute things.
Yes, Drew now has a Gacha Gacha addiction. Yes, we are looking at sourcing one for our studio.
Yes, there is a district in Tokyo just for fabric. And another for kitchen-ware. And musical instruments. And anime. Yes, there is a 12 story building just for stationary and art supplies. Yes, there are fruit shaped bus stops.
No, we haven’t made the scrapbook we promised we’d make with all the cute stickers, washi tape and film photos we collected along the way. But man do we have the photo evidence to prove all of these said cute things.
In case you somehow missed our very clever Eddie Jet Set marketing — we took Zorali, Little Tienda, Changes and Meak in our suitcase and this is a tiny taste of what we came back with:
Because it was such a big crew and we had so much to do, it made sense to map it all out in detail. Also, if you’ve worked with us before you know we love a bit of project management.
So, we mapped everything out on Wanderlog which is great because it means we can share everything with you too!
