After our stay in Tokyo Bay to visit Disney Sea, we packed our bags and made our way towards the more central part of Tokyo for the remainder of our trip.
As soon as we hit the subway station, we couldn’t help but stop at some of the food courts to check out all the delicious food, and ended up having an early lunch there.
We’ve stayed in so many different hotels in Tokyo for our previous trips, so we thought we’d pick a more unusual one this time. We booked a room at the Henn Na Hotel Tokyo Ginza, a hotel run by robots. We weren’t quite sure what to expect, but figured if we were to try something high tech and cool, it might as well be in Japan!
Upon arrival to the robot hotel, we entered the very small lobby, where 2 female robots greeted us “Hello”, along with the familiar Japanese bow.
That was it. There were two kiosks in front of them, but didn’t really offer much help. After waiting a minute or two, someone (an actual live person) came out from behind the robots and greeted us. She helped us to check in, and then directed us to the kiosks to pick up our room keys. After the room keys were ready, the robots said “Arigato” (thank you in Japanese) and bowed to us again.
Throughout our stay, there were no robots to service us or the hotel, as far as we could tell. The only two robots we ever saw were the two at the front desk, but they didn’t seem to serve much of a purpose other than to greet you when you pass by, or say thank you when you retrieve your room key from the kiosk. That was disappointing since the whole point of staying in a robot hotel was to experience being service by robots!
We really didn’t have much plans for our stay in Tokyo this time, other than to eat our hearts out, and that’s precisely what we did every single day. Bridgette’s cousin, Sherwin, and his mom joined us mid week from Hong Kong, which was fantastic because having more people meant we could order more food to share, haha! One of Bridge’s request was to go back to Harajuku, and we ended up going there three times in one week!
Her favorite parts of Harajuku:
The photobooths in Japan are so “kawaii” (cute) even though you end up looking completely unrecognizable in the final photo, lol!
You’ll see lots of people character dressing in Harajuku, on any given day, so Bridge can also dress like a bunny without feeling out of place! 🙂
There are so many sweets in all of Japan, but especially in Harajuku! We found the giant rainbow cotton candy that has been an Instagram sensation. It was huge, and I told Bridgette that we should only eat half at most, but it turned out to be so delicious that we finished the whole thing!
Character cafes are a thing in Japan, and we went to the Pompompurin Cafe in Harajuku for afternoon tea one day. We really were intending to have a small snack, but the items on the menu looked so cute we ended up ordering way more than we should have!
Kiddy Land is a must go in Harajuku. It’s 5 floors of toys, gifts, stationaries, and goodies of Sanrio, Disney, Snoopy, and about a thousand other cartoon characters. One can literally spend a whole afternoon there because there’s just so much to see and everything is so darn cute!
And ofcourse, shopping is inevitable in Harajuku. Along Takashita Street, you’ll find shops with very unusual clothing styles, and a lot of cute accessories. Prices are fairly reasonable too!
Before I end this post, I must share a great tonkatsu restaurant that we discovered in Harajuku on this trip! It’s call Tonkatsu Maisen Aoyama and it was probably one of the very best tonkatsu we’ve had!
I’ll wrap up our Tokyo trip in the next post with more delicious food recommendations and fun things to do!
