See travel log day 62 below for into on Akiba.

Travel Log: Day 60 (8/26), Tokyo Japan

I slept like crap again last night. I got somewhere around 5 hours of total sleep and my worst ever sleep score of 43. Daytime tiredness was also at a new high.

We decided that jet lag or not we needed to start venturing out from our Lawson meal plan and start seeing some sights. I had a cafe in mind for lunch, so we started school a little early to get to the cafe before any lunch rush that might exist. It turned out to be closed so we just started walking the other way toward a temple (Ekoin) that we wanted to visit. The temple was sort of neat, but it’s a temple and temples are kind of boring.

After leaving the temple we started looking at menus as we crossed them. We almost ate at this burger place but then wondered what the hell we were doing. We settled on a sushi place. It looked a bit intimidating but we needed to jump start ourselves in getting out there. It was really great and less intimidating once we were in there. They greeted us, asked how many people, and seated us. The server didn’t speak english but their menu was simple to follow and her gestures made everything super clear. The food was good. We watched others to figure out that to pay I just needed to stand by the register. In my brain fog I grabbed a 1K yen note thinking it was a 10K note. Our bill came to about 5K yen ($30), and I handed the 1K to her and she just said “no”. I realized my mistake and got her the correct money. Hopefully she didn’t think I was trying to negotiate the price and low-ball her.

We spent a lot of time walking the rest of the day outside of our school schedule. The scale of Tokyo is staggering. We just walked 10-15 minutes from our place and every street you cross is like an entire world of its own. You could go down any one of those little side streets and have many dining options and accommodations. If you then multiply that by the entire area of Tokyo it feels infinite.

Breakfast and dinner were Lawson again. At breakfast when the cashier asked me if I wanted a plastic bag I said yes please in Japanese and blew his mind. He was truly so excited and I think I nailed the pronunciation because he then started speak more Japanese to me. That makes me wonder if casually using these phrases just causes confusion for everyone. It’s probably simpler if they see white tourists and speak English to us, and we just speak English back. Total food spending on the day including a 7-11 stop to get toiletries and a coffee restock was about $77.

Travel Log: Day 61 (8/27), Tokyo Japan

My sleep was garbage again last night. It’s the same pattern every time. We held off until almost 9pm before going to bed. At 1:30am I woke up, which is the usual 4.5 hours. Fitbit credited me another hour (probably generous) when I dozed off later in the night. My sleep score was a 74, which is an improvement.

I felt pretty good today despite the bad sleep. I felt particularly good the second half of the day. Hopefully that’s a sign that the jet lag is fading, but I’m not counting on that and I’m preparing some insomnia activities for tonight. I’ll do some things like come up with school ideas, practice Japanese, etc. All I know is that I don’t want to lay there trying to force sleep anymore.

We ate convenience store food all day again, but really mixed it up and went with 7-11 for lunch. Even that was more of an adventure than I expected. We had to ask for a corn dog because they were behind glass for some reason. Then we had to navigate the questions about bags, do we want hot water, do we need chop sticks, etc.

Typical homeschool activities. JC and I went on a long walk in the afternoon. Then we also went on a shorter walk with BC.

I need to score a good sleep night and start getting energy and enthusiasm for exploring Tokyo. Even 6-7 hours with an 80 sleep score would pump me up.

Travel Log: Day 62 (8/28), Tokyo Japan

After sleeping relatively well last night (6.5 hours) compared to previous nights, I had a lot of energy and enthusiasm to get out and see more of Tokyo. JC was also losing her mind in the morning going stir crazy. We decided to get back to completing school in the morning so we could consolidate our free time into the afternoon in order to use it for exploring.

The great thing with our setup here is that we have no timeline that we must adhere to once noon hits. We already decided we are eating every meal out, so our food is portable. We can get great water at any vending machine, so no need to carry a bunch of water. Tokyo is also incredibly safe so no worries if we go past dark. It leaves us able to truly roam free.

For lunch we went to a place just a couple blocks away called Oasis cafe. I plan to leave them a google review because the whole experience was exceptional. It’s run by a mother and daughter who are both engaging and friendly. They serve coffee and other drinks along with bagel sandwiches. It was all so good, except AC didn’t really like her red soda. Somehow, and I have no idea how, the mom of the two sussed out that AC didn’t enjoy it and surprised her with a different drink to take with her.

From there we walked over to Akiba and spent a few hours walking the main street and some side streets. This was the first thing we’ve done that really felt like Tokyo as I stereotype it in my mind. We did claw games, vending machines, video games, ate crapes, browsed electronics, etc. It was fun and stimulating and just the charge we needed to get things going here. We only managed to spend about $26 during that time as well. JC and I were hoping to hang out in the area until dinner time, but we were all losing our steam so we went back to our condo. We got some things from our go-to, Lawson.