Miss you already, Japan!

So a quick rundown of some highlights of the trip:

Food - we mostly ate Japanese food the whole time, excepting a couple of times eating Japanese-style western food, and a couple of times eating straight western food. It was all delicious; can't recommend teppanyaki, tempura, and okonomiyaki highly enough. And anything with noodles, mmmmmm noodles. *drool* By the end of the trip we'd spent so much on food (argh, but it was so good!!!) that we were living on onigiri 🍙 (rice balls - I took a liking to the pickled plum), hotdogs, and instant ramen 🍜 . According to the Cup Noodles museum, instant ramen has even been in space, as a convenient zero-G meal.

Space noodles! Oh, Japan.

Xmas - the one food I regret not having was KFC, which is apparently the meal of choice for Xmas time (oh, Japan ). Despite our lack of fried chicken 🍗, Xmas is quite unavoidable in Japan - we heard many remixes (and indeed the original) of Wham's "Last Christmas" many times, Disneyland was playing Xmas carols from the carpark onwards and most of the park was Xmas themed. And the large shopping malls had enormous Xmas trees and often pretty lights as well.

Kawaii - cute icons abound in Japan and are embraced as just a normal everyday part of the culture. Hello Kitty and Friends, Minions, Snoopy, Miffy, cats, unicorns, pandas, etc etc etc. The mascots for the 2020 Olympics were already prevalent all over the place, and super cute. Basically, Japan is the land of adorable cartoon animals.

Thanks, Kitty! I'll miss you!