Hello and welcome back! As promised, here’s how my Tokyo trip went down.
At Kansai Gaidai, the foreign exchange students are lucky enough to get a fFall break right around Halloween time, giving us five5 days to go spend doing whatever we want. My friends and I decided to unsurprisingly take our break to Tokyo, a must-see when in Japan. We started off our journey with a two hour Shinkansen, or bullet train, coasting through the country at 200 miles per hour giving us view after incredible view until landing in Shinjuku, Tokyo. We elected to stay in a capsule hotel for the first half of our trip, which is as the name suggests, a hotel room barely the size of a mattress.
The streets of Shinjuku were a sight to behold, with glowing neon signs on looming buildings above streets densely packed with pedestrians. Giant digitaltv-screen billboards littered the walls and above them all was a life-sized replica of a Godzilla head and hand looming above a building. The next day, after stopping at a cafe full of cats, was the highlight of this half of the trip for me. Everyone at some point wants to sporadically do something fun, which is just what myself and two others did. Instead of joining the rest of our group for dinner, the three of us said, “Aah, what the heck” and took a train to see the full extent of the city. This took us to the location of the imperial palace of Japan, though the grounds were closed when we got there, and the Tokyo skytree. Even walking towards the enormous structure was unbelievable, let alone the view. The view from the skytree was unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. Looking over the endless expanse of lights dancing hundreds of feet below us rather than above was something I will never forget. While I wished I could stay up there forever, we had one more major place to visit before our weekend ran out.
Before the trip, the ten of us decided upon an airbnb to stay for two nights in a town on one of the Fuji Five Lakes, which as you might expect, were the lakes surrounding the real Mt. Fuji itself. This airbnb was of a traditional Japanese house with sliding paper doors, straw Tatami mats, the whole thing was straight out of a period piece. Unfortunately, though, the only time available for us to spend at Mt. Fuji was right during one of the cloudier seasons, meaning we weren’t able to view it in all its glory. If we had, though, we would have seen its peak without snow for the first time this late in the year in over a hundred years. We spent the last days of our trip exploring the town and taking a gondola ride to the top of an onlooking mountain to get as good a view of the town and mountain as we could. Though I say this a lot, this trip isn one I will never ever forget.
Collin Haberbosch can be contacted at
