Day 6!

Today we left Osaka for Tokyo. The first part of our Tokyo
trip was an adventure in itself! For one, we went to the WRONG airport**
in the morning so we had to reschedule our flight and make our way to
other airport, effectively burning up the whole day. Fortunately it was a
very free and easy itinerary so everyone was quite chill about it.
(Super thankful for the best (and most forgiving haha) traveling
companions ever!) Instead of arriving in Tokyo in the morning as
scheduled, we only arrived in the late evening– totally exhausted.
Because my brother no longer stays in Tokyo, we’d booked another airbnb apartment in the heart of Shibuya (great location, really!) but the
house was wayyyyyy smaller than we thought/ could tell from its pics!

So
imagine 4 exhausted travellers turning up at Shibuya, walking past all
the swanky hotels, trudging up love hotel hill (haha!) and reaching our
apartment which was a dingy little place, opening the door only to find
that the place looked like it could hardly fit 2, much less 4 and to my
horror, was dirty beyond belief. 🙁 The floor was so grimy and the
mattresses looked very worn and old 🙁

If there is one
thing I really cannot take, is a dirty sleeping area that I’m not
prepared for. I’m totally cool if I have to sleep in the forest in a
tent and there may be bugs and stuff because at the very least, I’ll be
prepared to rough it out but I certainly didn’t expect to pay good money
and rough it out in Tokyo! I honestly wanted to just forfeit the
payment, pack up and suggest we shift to a hotel nearby. Fortunately for
me, the people that I traveled with aren’t the complaining sort. If
there is a problem, we would fix it. So we put on our Bob the Builder
hats and trudged determinedly to the nearest Don Quixote and bought
cleaning supplies. What an adventure right! I’ve never bought THAT many
cleaning supplies from a store in Tokyo EVER (Whoo! Experience! :D) And
as we put on some loud music and scrubbed away at the floors and shifted
the furniture to make space, I felt my longing to be back at Roppongi
in my brother’s swanky apartment slowly ebb away. By the time we were
done, we’d scrubbed the floor in time to the whole of Taylor Swift’s
album (we are tweens at heart haha), grimaced at the state of the rags
and grinned with satisfaction at the squeaky clean floors. Looking back,
these little hiccups are honestly what makes a trip, a trip and I’m
eternally grateful for grumble-free, super positive traveling companions 🙂

That night, we slept really well. Whether it was from pure exhaustion of the day’s events or from the food induced coma (HAHA), I wouldn’t know. But I like to think that the sleep was sweet because we’d earned it and we really happy that night 🙂

 P.s I’m including the links to the airbnb apartment because I think that if you are a traveller concerned only about location, it still is a great place to stay. To be fair, the apartment owner also refunded our cleaning fees and tried to be as polite and accommodating as possible, so definitely no issues about that.