Three Girls, Four Days in Tokyo…

While in Tokyo for four days, my friends Liz and Jess and I…

-Ate fermented soy beans. And seafood custard. And beef tongue. A giant cotton candy. And potato chips with ice cream. (Okay, Jess only had the veggies. And yes, Liz I’m sorry for eating all the cheese puffs but they were amazing.)

-Got stupidly excited over rotator belt sushi that requires zero human interaction and magically comes to you. #antisocialsocialclub. 

-Missed a bus to Mt Fuji because of #jetlag, so made an impromptu trip to Tokyo Disneyland instead, where we proudly wore Minnie Mouse ears and rode all the rides. (Or if you’re Jess, ended up in a robot bear performance spoken in Japanese with a Southern accent.)

-Somehow ended up at a robot restaurant (that isn’t actually a restaurant but a touristy Times Square-like show) where there weren’t exactly robots but women and men in fun costumes on mechanical-ish stages, dinosaurs and transformer creatures… and it was oddly mesmerizing.

-Walked by a “teen selfie store” and figured out that by following said store on Instagram we could put on princess dresses and take selfies for 10 minutes. So obviously we happily did that, laughing until we cried.

-Convinced Liz to buy a bow for her hair because it was *only* $10 and she would wear it *so much* … and then it was $14, sparking a 28-day challenge to wear the bow in different hairstyles to make double-back her money. (She’s coming up on day 4.)

-Submitted a story about Veteran-owned gifts for Veteran’s Day from a media review suite at the Ritz-Carlton Tokyo that I wrote on a flight from Lisbon to Dubai, because this is my new normal.

-Crashed a performance of a teen Japanese pop girl group at a random food court we only found because there was a public toilet…

-…also on the subject of restrooms, discovered the magic that is Japanese toilets. #sofreshandsocleanclean

-Ate at the home of a local Japanese woman (and her bestie) for a USA TODAY story, complete with girl chat about dating, life and love, proving frustration with men knows no time zone or country.

If this is any indication of the crazy, ridiculous, bizxare, amazing, wonderful world of Japan… I think I may be in love.

Moving to Kyoto tomorrow!