We arrived in Tokyo on March 3rd!
This is the beginning of our longest stay in one place so far – we’re staying here for 2.5 months! We’re excited to have time to relax and have a bit more of a routine – a bit of a vacation from our vacation, perhaps.
We spent the first week here with WW’s parents, whose place we are staying at. We’re super grateful for their generosity as it made our long stay in Japan possible – thank you!!! We spent the first week with them getting to know the surrounding area and learning the intricacies of the very complex (but wonderful) public transit system. It was great getting to eat home-cooked food again, especially WW’s mom’s food! 😀
We went out for a lovely dinner at Lawry’s to celebrate Jonny’s birthday early with WW’s parents!
Mmmmm, wagyu beef…
It has been awesome to Hustle in Tokyo! We say this all the time, but being part of a global community of dancers means instant friends everywhere we go, and we are especially grateful for that in Tokyo. The Hustle community here is huge, and has open sessions multiple times a week! We’ve gotten to know people as we see them and dance with them week after week, which has been really lovely.
J – On a related note, I’ve found it a bit more challenging to integrate into the Locking community in Tokyo! From what people tell me, most people learn and make crews in university, then continue practicing with just their own crew. So despite there being hundreds of Lockers here, there are not really any open practices to go to. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
We’ve done some touristy things, but mostly enjoyed cooking again (!) and relaxing at home, too.
We visited Teamlab Borderless (immersive digital art exhibit – very popular with social media influencers), Tsukiji fish market (previously housed the famous tuna auction but is now just really nice vendors), lots of restaurants, and just started to see our first cherry blossoms!
Oddly enough, these eggs (tamagoyaki) were our highlight of the Tsukiji Fish Market! So good! Very egg-y but also very sweet!
Cherry Blossoms!!! This was at the Meguro River Promenade. It was VERY busy that day – people do love blossoms.
WW went to Seoul for 5 days with her sister!
WW It was the first time my sister and I had travelled alone together without our parents, and it was lovely!
Ivy and I did tons of eating (obviously): we had Korean BBQ, delicious sticky rice donuts, Randy’s donuts 3 days in a row (I even brought some home to Tokyo), chicken hot pot, kimbap, seafood pancake, seulleungtang… we really love eating and we really love Korean food.
We also managed to catch two exhibits from some artists I really love: the first was MSCHF, an artists’ collective best known for the Big Red Boot but that does a lot of irreverent crowd-sourced art poking fun at fashion culture and exploring ideas of “what is art” (lol); the second was Tanaka Tatsuya, a wonderful miniaturist who does beautiful work with everyday objects that are sometimes visual puns.
Randy’s donuts 4 life
Of course we had to try on the Big Red Boots for ourselves!
Tanaka Tatsuya
Looking lovingly at food 100% of the time!
Meanwhile, Jonny just chilled out in Tokyo.
J – It was nice to have some alone time in a comfortable setting that is starting to feel like home. I’ve realized that spending time alone in a hotel doesn’t really ‘recharge’ me in the same way. Having a weekend alone after being in the same apartment for 3 weeks allowed me to enjoy fully, since it already felt familiar!
For more photos, check out this post. Stay tuned for our April Japan post!
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Looks lovely! Glad you caught the cherry blossoms and the food looks delicious as always
nice that you’ve found a way to feel homey, homies! i was wondering how that was gonna work out back when you were planning all this.
(for tanaka tatsuya, even “really love” is a little understated, weiwei…)
by my calculations we’re approaching 2.5 months after you arrived.. what’s next?
We’re going to Taiwan with my parents for a bit, then after that we’re not 100% sure! haha! WW’s Canadian citizenship could come through basically anytime (and we’ll have to go back to Canada on short notice for that), so we’ve been leaving planning to the last second. There’s a possibility we might go to Portugal…?