New Orders are in. This time it’s Tokyo. Our foremost expert on the area, Agent McBurger, is already on some cockamamie assignment in Edmonton of all places.  Tha Queebs and I have been tasked with flying to Tokyo and heading straight to the Shinjuku Ward to investigate. We leave next Thursday.

Judging by the agitated chirps/orders from Dr. Birdrito, there seems to be a high degree of risk on this assignment. During mission prep the only risk I can ascertain is that a lot of things are already booked and we simply won’t be able to do them. As a result Tha Queebs and I find ourselves in the strange stages of… planning ahead. Rather than just getting to a city, heading to the center and taking a left at the largest church or temple, we are in the very unnatural throws of what some would call ‘Itinerary Building’. It’s proving to be somewhat difficult and even though we started looking into things ‘well in advance’ there are already a number of items we won’t get to see.

Top 3 things we won’t be doing in Tokyo (so far):
1. Yayoi Kusama Museum
Nope. It’s booked out for the next three months. I suppose this is fair since it just opened on Oct 1st, but we were pretty pumped to see some contemporary art from one of Japan’s most vibrant and interesting artists. Sadly, we will miss the new pumpkin…

2. Studio Ghibli Museum
So we thought, ok, let’s go to this other cool concept for a museum (spoiler alert: Nope). Studio Ghibli has delivered a fair number of memorable animated flicks (Spirited away, Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro, etc…) and once we saw some pics of the museum grounds we were totally in. Except we aren’t. It’s also booked solid.

3. The Gracery Hotel Shinjuku
Once we started looking into Tokyo we seemed to be drawn more and more towards the Shinjuku ward. After we found out they had a Godzilla themed hotel and you could stay in rooms with views of a giant, scale model Godzilla outside, or even smashing through your rooms walls, well we just had to stay there! But we can’t. Halloween weekend… makes sense.

So we’ve learned our first lesson on travelling to Japan and perhaps a return trip is already in order. But this does make itinerary building easier since we already can’t do a bunch of stuff. It’s like me ordering at a sushi restaurant with my fish allergy (guess I’ll do the teriyaki chicken?). But our trip won’t be all teriyaki chicken tourism, there’s a ton of shit to do and we’ve already got a bunch of goodies lined up.

We’ve also hit up The Agency’s Requisitions Officer (aka Pamazon Rime) for all manner of travel gadgetry and mission supplies. Smiling boxes should be piling up all week as we round out our arsenal of compact, efficient travel gear.

We’re starting to get pretty excited for the new adventure. I’ll try to keep this space up to date with the shenanigans as we bullet train from Tokyo -> Kyoto -> Osaka -> Hiroshima and places in between. I’ve got an old contact to hit up and hopefully we’ll make some new ones too.

We’re on the case…