I probably made the longest restaurant list I’ve ever made for this Japan trip, but sadly, we have gone to only one listed place in our 2.5 days here so far. I suppose it’s actually not that sad considering that every meal has been very enjoyable and has exceeded expectations not just for quality but also for price.

Three years ago when I was in Singapore, I met a friend’s friend who was American and working for Delta while living in Tokyo. We spent quite a bit of time together for the few days he was in Singapore, and he told me that while of course, Tokyo was not a cheap place, he said he felt that most people’s depiction of how expensive it is wasn’t very accurate. He said that he paid less for his shared apartment, where he had his own bedroom and bathroom, than most of the people he knew living in Manhattan, and if you wanted to eat Japanese food in Tokyo, it could be had for quite cheap and in most cases, less than eight to ten U.S. dollars. Sure, you could spend $500 for dinner if you wanted (and there are quite a number of restaurants to do that at given that Tokyo has a large number of Michelin star restaurants), but you could also spend less than $5 for dinner at hundreds of places. Hotels are expensive in Tokyo, but they’re in the same ballpark as hotels in New York City.

Everything he told me was right. On our first night, I had a delicious pork katsu curry over rice with miso soup for less than $7 USD, and today, we had ramen for lunch for about $6 USD each. As I slurped my delicious tonkotsu broth, I thought about how we’d normally pay $12-20 for good quality ramen in New York City and felt a bit sulky. Everywhere you go here, there are so many overwhelming options for food. It’s like being in New York, except everyone here is extremely polite and well mannered, and all the writing is in Japanese. And there’s probably no high fructose corn syrup in every product here.

One of the most enjoyable parts of traveling to another part of the world is observing everyday people in that society and how they lead their lives – and then thinking about how it compares with life back home.

One thing that is so conspicuous in Tokyo is how everyone seems to follow the rules. On the subway stairs, there’s a sign and written guides on the steps for walking up the stairs on the left, down the stairs on the right. Everyone follows this. Everyone. The most amusing part of watching this was when there were too many people going up the stairs that they started lining up in a double-file line, but not a single person was walking down the right side. I thought in my New Yorker head, why isn’t anyone just walking up the right side of the stairway? It’s wide open! Gradually but very hesitantly, a few people meekly walked up the right side, and Chris and I joined them. “I don’t follow rules, baby,” Chris said. Yes, he’s certainly not Japanese.

I’ve been consumed in the last week with researching what to see, smell, and taste in Japan for our upcoming trip in July. I began by researching the history and sights of Hiroshima, then Kyoto, and now Tokyo and the surrounds. I suppose I left Tokyo to the end because I knew how overwhelming it would be. It’s a massive city with a population of over 36.9 million, which is almost double the population of New York City, the biggest city in the U.S. It’s famed for its high energy, fusion of the modern and the traditional, and endless eateries. Robot restaurants, rice cookers with 20 different settings, women with mile-long fake eyelashes, and matcha green tea-flavored everything abound.

Five years ago, Tokyo surpassed Paris for having the most number of Michelin-star rated restaurants in the world, which is pretty impressive given a lot of these restaurants are random no-ambiance sushi restaurants that don’t necessarily live up to the stereotypical image of the “ideal” in French culture. So when it comes to doing research on what and where to eat, it’s an endless list on every food blog and news site on what’s considered the best and what’s worth waiting for at multiple price points. To make matters more complicated, not all restaurants’ Romanized names are written on their store fronts, so I have to create a guide with both the Japanese name Romanized and the Japanese characters. And because of how large Japan is, we need to organize restaurants by location/neighborhood and food type.

I don’t think I’ve ever planned a trip where I was more overwhelmed by all the options that faced me. I guess I could have felt that way about cities like Shanghai and Paris, which have endless things to see and do, but for some reason, because I’ve been wanting to go to Tokyo for so long, especially after a failed planned trip when I was 21, that all the hype and energy has accumulated to a point where I want to make sure I see and do as much is humanly possible during my first trip there without not sleeping. 🙂

In the U.S., it generally costs more to buy fresh produce than it does to buy processed (yet filling) meals, such as a box of Kraft instant macaroni and cheese, a Cup-of-Noodle, or something else that is not particularly healthy for you. It’s part of the reason poor people tend to have worse diets and be more obese — they don’t have enough money to buy what’s good for them, so they go for what’s cheap and filling because they don’t want to starve to death.

In other countries, the costs tend to be more on par or even cheaper. I remember walking around food markets in many other places around the world and marveling over how cheap their produce was. Food in large grocery stores tended to be more expensive than at these markets. With skincare, as I am researching things to buy in Japan for our upcoming trip, skincare that is of a certain quality is relatively so cheap there compared to here. A bottle of equivalent quality cleansing oil that costs about $30 here costs $8-10 there. A $4 mascara in Tokyo would probably cost somewhere between $15-20 here.

The way I look at this is, perhaps if a society values something more and looks at it as vital, then maybe that’s why it’s more reachable in terms of affordability. If we absolutely must have fresh fruit and vegetables, it should be more affordable, right? The same should go for good skincare (sunblock, face creams). The more expensive they are, the more out of reach, and thus fewer people will buy them. If this is true, then I’d think the U.S. just doesn’t value good diet and health (via quality of skin and body through skincare regimen), which would be quite sad.

We’re spending the long weekend in Ohio and Kentucky this Memorial Day weekend with Chris’s parents. They’ve never visited either state, so we started our day in Cincinnati at the Findlay Market, which is one of the oldest public markets in the country. It was a really fun setup that reminded me a bit of the markets we’ve seen in West Virginia, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland. As we’re walking through one of the markets and stop to try some cheese spreads from a vendor who owns a restaurant in Kentucky, the man makes some polite chit chat with us and asks where we are from. I tell him that Chris and I live in New York City, but his parents are visiting from Australia, so we decided to spend the long weekend in Ohio and Kentucky. He gives me a very puzzled look, and he says as he gives a little laugh, “I’m not trying to be rude, but why in the world are you here?” He elaborates that he’s confused as to why people who are visiting the U.S. from Australia would want to visit states like Ohio and Kentucky; he’d think that people from such an interesting country (“interesting” for Australia is debatable) would want to visit the more popular and well known states, like California or New York. And for Chris and me, how did we even think about flying to Cincinnati of all cities to visit? I tell the man that we are trying to see as much of the country as possible and see what everyone has to offer. I also let him know that we’re doing our second day trip to Kentucky tomorrow. He smiles and says he likes my attitude and that he hopes we enjoy our time in his town.

The man was clearly being modest, but maybe he just doesn’t know what makes his home town so great. Maybe no one really gets why anyone would want to visit their relatively small home town. But I still believe every place has something special about it. Maybe everyone in these ‘smaller town’ areas needs to have a little bit more pride about where they are from. I’d be so irritated all the time if I had to say things like, “Why would you want to visit (where I am now that I represent)? Don’t you want to visit (insert some other glitzy, bigger city nearby)?” It’d be as though I have little self worth.

I’m starting to do research for our upcoming long Memorial Day weekend in Ohio and Kentucky. Chris, his parents, and I will be based in Cincinnati and are planning to explore the surrounds, and drive down to Lexington and explore the Kentucky Derby land. Because Memorial Day is quickly approaching, everyone at work is asking what everyone else is doing for the long weekend. It’s funny to share that I’m going to Ohio and Kentucky for the long weekend with people who are living and working in New York because the majority of people here seem to think those states are not worth visiting. And when they hear we are flying there and not driving, they think we are even crazier to pay for airfare to get to these places.

I’m almost like a Middle America person when I say this, but I just find these comments really frustrating. I grew up in California, went to school in Massachusetts, and now work and live in New York, all three of which are considered good places to visit, study, work, and live, but I’ve always wanted to explore states of the country that are far less traveled to. It’s the optimist in me, but I think there is something great about pretty much every place in the world and in this country. I don’t want to be the snob or ignoramus who thinks that there’s nothing to see in Ohio or Kentucky or Idaho, especially if I have never even visited these areas. Who am I to even make that judgment? The overwhelming assumption there when a person makes a comment like that is that she thinks she’s superior to these places, which is pretty pig-headed to me. People willingly choose to live and work in all of these places, so there has to be something that they get pleasure from in these cities and states.

A friend of mine had the argument that time is limited in life, so why would you want to visit places that don’t have known things to see to the average person? I think that argument should be reframed as, you should want to see and visit the places that interest you as a person, not you as one of a massive group of generic people. Few people would say that there is nothing to see in Paris, but many would argue that is true for a city like Cleveland. As someone who really enjoyed the time she spent in Cleveland, I would argue it’s a place worth seeing for me.