A day in the life (in Japan)
I’mmm baaaack (with another very logistical, not photo heavy blog post).
Before the sabbatical started, we had generally agreed that this would largely be Marshall’s (photo) blog, and I would be in charge of our Instagram. After 1.5 months of traveling so far, we’ve gotten a little bit more extreme where Marshall would sometimes say when I ask him to let me borrow some of his suitcase space or figure out a way to share photos more seamlessly so we don’t have to double snap a photo, “Hey we’re just two separate people who happen to be going to all the same places and sharing hotel rooms, but we should be in charge of our own packing, our own photos and our own social media.”
I’ve gotten Marshall to budge on the first two already (Did you know iCloud and Google Photos have this concept called “partner sharing”? Game changer) so here I am posting a “guest post” as a sign of mixing and mingling.
We’ve kept in touch with a lot of our friends and family via this blog, my Instagram, and also FaceTime but I don’t think people actually know what happens in a typical day — we actually were surprised ourselves when we started accounting for how we actually spend a day (and how much actual “work” there is each day). So here’s a typical day in Japan for us with some caveats at the end. Enjoy!
A typical day in Japan
The morning
8:30am - I love free hotel breakfast. There are some memes online that no matter how tired you are, how bad the breakfast actually is, you will always get up for free hotel breakfast. The meme is me. I am the meme. In Japan, if we aren’t staying in a ryokan (a traditional Japanese inn that generally includes dinner and breakfast), we’re staying at a Marriott property because I have status, and that status normally gets me free breakfast. Most hotel breakfasts in Japan end at 10am and so we generally wake up around now.
9:30am - Marshall is not a fan of free breakfast. Why eat free breakfast when you can eat good Japanese food outside of the hotel? Plus we’re both very much not morning people so normally I go downstairs first and grab a table.
9:45am - Marshall comes down finally for breakfast and he beelines it for plates of veggies and fruit. Surprisingly, there aren’t that many ways for us to get our veggie or fruit intake and to make sure we have enough fiber in our system, Marshall loads up during breakfast. Japanese breakfast is pretty good on fruits and veggies too — lots of leafy greens, steamed vegetables, pickled veggies and cut fruit for breakfast.
10:30am - Digest a little and start to mobilize out the door. Depending on what city we’re in, we have a couple of points of interest to hit before lunch. Some other days, we dilly dally in the morning and only head out of the hotel where the first stop is lunch. Marshall has been the point person mostly for planning our days in Japan. Throughout our entire relationship, I’ve been the person in charge of hotels and food reservations. Marshall’s been in charge of points of interest and the actual scheduling of the days to make things most efficient geographically. The breakdown has been similar in Japan except he’s also taken on the food planning after we left Tokyo because he started learning some more basic Japanese and can navigate Tabelog (Japanese yelp) better than I can.
Once a week for Marshall or whenever we move to a different hotel that I want to show my parents, we Facetime them. Marshall talks with his family for around an hour a week, and I talk to my parents 10-20 minutes each time since we’re moving hotels more frequently than once a week. We do this in the morning since it’s night for them and they’re back home from work.
The afternoon
1pm - Lunch time. Japan has both a culture of restaurant reservations and also walk in culture depending on the city and type of food. Depending on what we’re eating, I’ve been asking the hotel concierges to help book things for us ahead of time. In Japan, a lot of restaurants only take reservations over the phone (or online, if they’re fancy but most times you have to pay a fee to book online so best to try and avoid), and like in NYC, the most hype restaurants require a reservation many weeks in advance so relying on the concierge to help us out while we were in the US or Africa was a lifesaver. Plus obviously, we don’t speak Japanese (Marshall would probably add “well enough to make a restaurant reservation”).
2pm - Digest and walk around. Our friend James went to Japan for vacation last year, and by the end of 10 days, he was sick of Japanese food. We made fun of him so much for this but secretly worried a bit if choosing to spend 40 days in Japan was too much. Would we get tired of the food too? So far 30 days in, I can say that Japanese food has so much variety that so far, we aren’t tired of it.
Marshall has particularly enjoyed eating at restaurants in Japan because it’s one of the few interactions where he can practice his Japanese. By now, he’s pretty good at saying a handful of key phrases enough to get by in a Japanese restaurant (“I have a reservation, water please, check please, 2 orders of that, * points * that, thank you for this meal, it was delicious,”), and also is good enough to read most katakana aloud so we can navigate our own way through some of the Japanese-menus menus .
The unfortunate part is that while most katakana words sound like English, Marshall can’t make the jump from katakana sounds to actual English words which I happen to be good at so we’re a pretty good team for translating menus. Also chatGPT and google translate are helpful too obviously.
5pm - While Japan is super navigatable with public transportation, one of the many benefits of being in Japan for 40 days is that we get to take things slow. If the time between point A and point B is less than 1.5 hours, we’ll default to walking it.
On average, we’ve been hitting 20k+ steps per day with our max being 35k steps in Osaka. We also have this internal rule that if we don’t hit 20k steps that day, we have to go to the gym and do an actual workout (For me, it’s running and then a bodyweight exercise hour-long program that my trainer back in NYC put together for me. For Marshall, it’s a progression of calisthenics, a youtube HIIT class, and foundation training for lower back strength). In general, walking seems easier.
In Kyoto where there were a lot of points of interest (particularly shrines and rock gardens to gaze at), our friends Kevin and Yuki were describing to us that they spend most of their day sitting in 1-2 temples and just staring at the rock gardens. Our days were so different — even in Kyoto, we walked past the rock garden, stared at it for maybe twenty minutes, and then walked to our next destination.
I give our way of travel a more charitable interpretation: we really like local color. We enjoy walking around their neighborhoods and seeing how locals live (versus always taking the subway and skipping past all the different nooks and crannies in each neighborhood). Instead of the tourist hotspots or viral social media restaurants, we like eating at more neighborhood spots where most customers are locals and the staff speak very little English.
The night
6:30pm - which brings us to dinner time. Most of the time in Japan, especially since we’re walking everywhere, if we pass a bakery, or an ice cream shop, or a store with small snacks, I’m 100% going in. During one of our first days in Tokyo, we accidentally went to 10 different spots that served food (not full on meals but snacks, desserts, etc.). We haven’t really changed our travel ways since, and so by 8pm, we’re still probably full but also have dinner to look forward to.
7:30pm - We’re generally fast eaters because we normally don’t talk during the meal that much and instead focus on how good the food is. Also most restaurants in Japan that we’re going to are pretty quick turnaround — we’ve been eating a lot of <$20 pp meals or restaurants that serve 1 thing really really well. We’ve actively been avoiding the $$$$ sushi omakase restaurants because we aren’t that into sushi enough to taste the difference or warrant the price point. Plus we’ve heard and read online that the upper echelons of sushi in Japan is on par with NYC sushi scene (but the <$20 pp Japanese scene is not comparable, i.e. there are $10 bowls of udon or ramen that just don’t exist in NYC, so it’s not about the price but rather the amazingly high quality of the food itself at that price point).
8pm - Konbini ice cream. There are so many convenience stores everywhere, and every night on our walk back to the hotel, which often can take an hour or more, if the restaurant didn’t serve dessert after the meal, I stop and try a different ice cream variety. So far the Choco Monaka Jumbo by Morinaga and this Ice Manju mochi popsicle from Lawson have been my favorite. We also buy a big jug of water from the convenience store since we both don’t really drink teas, sodas, etc from the hotel and generally run out of the free water that the hotel gives us.
9pm - We generally get home pretty late but again, we’re both night owls so we begin our “night routine” now. This includes potentially exercising if we didn’t get our 20k steps. We each have our own night time responsibilities below. If we get back late, there’s not enough time to do everything, so on any given day, we’ll do as many as we can before bed and catch up the next day where we hopefully get home earlier. Some of the best days have been ones where we got back at 7 or 8pm and cleared up a bunch of errands for the next few days at once.
Marshall downloads all of his photos from his camera and uploads them onto Google photos. He also tries to edit a couple of them each night.
I post on Instagram stories about what we did that day and update my beli account (where we all ate and a rating).
We exercise if it’s an exercise day.
We both write our Day 1 entry (our daily diary) on our computers — we’ve been doing physical diaries for more than 5 years. Especially given the sabbatical and packing light, we’ve switched to an electronic version (thanks to Kevin who recommended it to us) which is nice because you can geotag and also include media in each entry. Also typing is faster than handwriting.
We spend 1-2 hours planning for the next stage of our trip be it another city in Japan (points of interest, places to eat, where to stay, emailing the concierge the requests, transportation between cities etc.), or big picture planning like what city/country are we going to first in South America and what do the flights look like? The big picture planning only happens once every few days which is nice, but Marshall spends some time each night mapping out roughly what our plan is for the next day.
Once a week, Marshall writes a blog post and I try to make an Instagram reel summarizing a city or chunk of the trip.
Random personal errands — given the time difference, these are best done in the morning when we wake up or right when we’re about to fall asleep. Recently, I’ve had to use our Skype number to chase down some hospital bills, clear up some flight delay insurance payment, and get all the paperwork set up ahead of our late 2024/ early 2025 cruises in South America which all require a US counterpart/ phone call.
Chilling on the internet / reading our books; after a long day of exploring, we’ll usually chill/doom scroll on the Internet for at least an hour. Marshall tries to stretch during this time.
1 or 2am - Time for bed! If we veer into the 2am+ territory of bedtime, we’ll likely not go to hotel breakfast. We try to get 8 hours of sleep a night, and again, because I like hotel breakfast so much, I sometimes go to bed before Marshall because he is not as enamored by mentaiko rice bowls in the morning as I am.
The caveats/ special mentions
Serendipity of friends - The craziest thing in a “typical day in the life in Japan” has been that we’ve actually been running into people from our NYC life randomly on the streets of Japan! So far within the first month, we’ve had run-ins with four of our friends. Four!!
Two were totally out of the blue - I saw Jonte on a random street in Kariuzawa and Eric in a random temple in Kyoto not knowing they were in Japan at all.
One was on Instagram - I posted that we were in Sapporo that night,on my Instagram story and William and Yuan responded to my story and asked if I was actually in Sapporo or if it was a latergram since they were in town too. We got lunch the day after!
One was semi-known - We knew Kevin and Yuki were going to be in Kyoto the same time we were and so we hung out with them 2 nights.
Staycations - We don’t have this set in stone but looking back, we’ve had to do “staycations” on average, once a week, where we minimally go out for meals and not do much else outside. Instead, we’re doing big planning days or recovering from some bout of stomach flu/ food poisoning (yes, we’ve both gotten stomach flu twice so far in Japan and it’s only been 30 days so far!!).
Luggage transport - I don’t really know where to include this in the schedule but luggage transport in Japan is a godsend. We’re already traveling pretty light (1 backpack and 1 carry on suitcase per person) but even then, having a heavy backpack and heavy suitcase in a crowded Japanese subway car or navigating a crowded train station when everybody is so respectful and orderly seems kind of rude. We actually don’t use a lot of the stuff in our suitcases (drone, summer clothes, backup skincare/toothpaste) and so being able to pack it away, send off the suitcase to not the next hotel but maybe 5 hotels later has been really useful to travel even lighter.
Coin laundry - We have done coin laundry every 1.5 weeks or so. We could go longer but stomach flu/ having a fever and sweating it out in your pjs makes you want to cleanse everything asap. Coin laundry has been extremely easy. The closest place has been a 2 min walk and the furthest has been 10 minutes — all very accessible. Most Japanese laundry machines have detergent included so even though we have laundry sheets (game changer for limiting packing), we can save them for South America coin laundry. The wash cycles take around 25-30 minutes and the dry cycles take 15-30 minutes. You pay 100 yen to dry your clothes every 15 minutes which is really nice when a lot of our clothes are default technical clothing/ quick dry clothing.
Side note, most of the hotels we’ve been staying at in Japan have provided PJs which has been awesome to elongate the need for laundry.
Massages - Even though we don’t work at office desks anymore, that doesn’t mean we don’t still have “desk body”, and given we’re walking 20k steps a day, our legs and feet get sore often (Marshall has even sorted to wearing his hiking shoes when we know we’re going to have a big step day). We’ve gotten a massage once a week and have used the NYC benchmark on pricing ($1/min). I don’t think we’re huge fans of Japanese massages though — most of the ones we’ve gone to have been shiatsu massages where you lay clothed on a massage bed underneath a blanket and there’s a lot of pressing and squeezing instead of gliding with oil directly on the skin. My legs do feel better the day after but my shoulders and upper back don’t get as much relief with this massage technique.