So we went to Japan...

We were fortunate enough to visit Japan towards the end of last year which was amazing, so I figured I may as well do a few reviews of things we did while over there starting with the places we stayed:

Being the major international conduit, Tokyo is a busy but nice place to visit. Expensive shops and tiny streets with a spiderweb of train and subway services that make it easy to get lost around. Most importantly if you like Shiroi Koibito chocolates and are not headed to Hokkaido, the airport here is the only place to get them! Shinkansen bullet trains are an option to get you to another hub pretty quickly but again, not really something I'd do again because I enjoyed it - more just for utility. The Tokyo-banana snack boxes were nice though! Quick note on trains: we avoided the "sardine" crowd time by simply starting our days at around 4 - 4:30 AM (we didn't go there to sleep. Lol).

Kyoto has more traditional stuff and tight market lanes and hawkers. Our transport here is less trains, more cabs, and a lot of walking to get exactly where we needed to go. Might put a broad reaching categorization now: the old castles and temples (in all the cities) are ok and beautiful, but get underwhelming fast. As such I don't see a point in revisiting Kyoto. Funny that Starbucks is everywhere here, even beside ancient temples! Our favorite breakfast place quickly became the St. Marc Cafe chain which we visited many times, occasionally even for "2nd breakfast"! :P

Osaka is more modern with more upmarket shops and honestly, you might even forget you are in Japan here as it's just another crowded bustling metropolis, albeit with loads of maid cafes. Other than a day trip to Nara (to see the deer) and back by train, we just walked around a lot here in shopping malls. The Nara deer are cute but also stinky and a bit pushy when they see you have food. While I've no real desire to revisit said deer, there's another airport in Osaka which is useful for travel, even if you still end up flying to Tokyo first before heading elsewhere. Speaking of shops: Don Quixote (available in all the big cities) has a crazy amount of variety and its almost mandatory to visit at least one of them. I chuckled that their "toy" section covers everything from Pokemon and kid stuff right beside vibrators, fluffy pink handcuffs and kinky outfits.

Awajishima / Awaji Island holds my favorite spot of our trip. No trains go to this island and a cab would be too expensive so we took a bus and then pre-booked a rental car. People that know me know I hate driving but this island was freaking amazing. So few people and better yet, the winding mountain roads were almost all mine since I intentionally avoided the main highways that either follow the shore or cut right down the middle. This is the place we really want to come back to, as even when we walked around it was usually just us on the sidewalk - a huge difference from the other cities we spent time in.