Japan 2024 Part 4: Trip Recap — Final Thoughts

I had a wonderful time exploring Tokyo alongside some great friends, and I’d say my first trip to Japan was a huge success. Did I get to see everything I wanted to? Of course not, especially since so many things I want to see and places I want to visit exist outside of Tokyo. In lieu of spending most of our time traveling to a lot of things outside the city, we utilized our time to see things closer to/inside the city, and I loved that.

Although we did an absolutely crazy amount of walking and saw so many things in such a short amount of time, we planned well and didn’t wear ourselves out. This made the trip all the more enjoyable, and it’s something I’ll be pulling forward into my planning for any future trips and adventures.

One of my absolute favorite things about this trip was who I spent it with. Sydney and Alecia were definitely the college friends I could talk with about anime, k-pop music, and general excitement about Japan without feeling like I was boring them. So taking this trip with them, as my first foray into Japan, was wonderfully amazing. And since Alecia’s been living in Japan for a couple of years, her knowledge of the language, subway system, and public transit in general was invaluable. She’ll be the first to say she’s not an expert, but she was an excellent guide.

The other absolute favorite thing for me, aside from all the things we did, that spanned the entire trip was searching for and collecting the stamps. We didn’t have a lot of luck at the beginning, but once we started to understand where they might be or who to ask, we made quite the team in finding so many! At the end of the trip, we ended up with 11 stamps! Most of those were nabbed in the latter half of the trip, but when I go back I’ll have a better idea of where and how to find them. 😄

The last takeaway I have is that my Japan bucket-list has grown exponentially. (Oops. 😂) I’ve added quite a few things to the list, including visiting all of the Japanese National Parks (of which there are 34) and visiting Tokyo Disney Sea. The newer Studio Ghibli Park is still definitely on that list as well, and I’ll get there eventually.

Overall, I had a wonderful time, and it definitely wasn’t long enough. But I’m looking forward to the chance to adventure more in the country, and hopefully I can go again with some amazing friends.