Japan2k26, Day 2
2026-01-25 11:28pm, 4 Chome-15-14 Nakacho, Koganei, Tokyo 184-0012
Good evening everyone,
today is a cold Sunday in January, and this is my second day in Japan. What can I say—just like I mentioned in the last post, I want to repeat how insanely in love I am with this place. This air makes me feel good, even if it’s unbelievably cold.
I’ll start this post by talking about the cold. It’s honestly kind of extreme here, hahaha. I had to buy a pair of thermal leggings to wear under my pants; I already had the top layer, so I didn’t even need to look for that. I’ll try them out tomorrow and let you know if they actually work.
Let me tell you a bit about how the day went so you can follow along. Today, unfortunately, I woke up very early because of a bad stomachache around 6:00 am. After a while everything was fine and I fell back asleep, then woke up again around 8:30. I opened the curtains, changed into something comfortable, and headed out with my brothers to the nearest 7-Eleven, which is about 100 meters from the hostel, to grab something for breakfast. I personally got a tuna and mayo onigiri and a small rice ball with a half-cooked egg on top, all accompanied by the worst coffee I’ve ever had. Sorry, 7-Eleven—everything else is great, but the coffee is a hard no. Anyway, breakfast is a sacred moment, and I didn’t want to ruin it, so I threw it away :(.
With full stomachs and feeling much more rested than on the first day, we headed to our first stop: Harajuku. It’s a really, really cute neighborhood where we bought a few useless little gadgets to give as gifts and ate a rice-and-meat dish that was way too good for how much it cost (1,500 yen, if I remember correctly). After that, we wandered through some quieter streets to take photos and record a few clips for videos—everything here is super aesthetic—then went back toward the station area to visit the Meiji Jingu garden, with its incredibly huge and fascinating temple.
The second stop was the Tokyo neighborhood par excellence: Shibuya. What can I say—it’s pretty much exactly how you’d imagine it. A very popular area, full of high-fashion stores and well-known brands of every kind. Here I bought a few small notebooks from MUJI and tried some gacha machines in a massive building that housed the Pokémon Center, Nintendo, Bandai, Capcom, and many other stores from the world of video games, cartoons, and anime/manga. Everything was great, but it was really crowded, so, tired and freezing, we moved back to Shinjuku to have dinner and visit the first Book-Off of many we’ll probably find. Book-Off is a very well-known chain here in Japan; it sells used and new items of all kinds, from electronics to cards, video games, retro and modern consoles, DVDs, books, manga, and pretty much anything you can think of.
The third and final stop of the day was the station near our hostel, around dinner time, to try an amazing gyoza-based set meal at a place nearby. Everything was delicious and, once again, very cheap. The menu included: 12 gyoza, a bowl of rice, an egg cooked on the outside but still runny inside (I mixed it into the rice and it was perfect), ginger, a small side dish with something I still don’t know what it was, a small plate of cold rice noodles, and finally a kind of gyoza that was boiled and served in a hot broth. An excellent dinner for the very reasonable price of 2,000 yen, beer included. The set menu alone cost 1,560 yen, which is incredibly cheap for how much and how well I ate. Everything here is tasty and affordable.
After that, the evening ended with a nice hot shower to relax muscles that had carried us through about 20 km of walking. Now I’m here in the hostel lounge, writing these words with a Japanese lofi playlist playing in the background, and I have to say that all of this never stops amazing me.
Thank you all for reading, see you tomorrow :)
– tega
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