Tokyo Day 1, Yes You Can

When Dx and I were first married, we traveled all the time. In the first two years of our marriage, I think we hit maybe 30-40 different major cities throughout the world (mostly in Europe). Having children altered our lifestyle significantly, but we recently decided that we would have to bite the bullet some day and try our hand at taking our kids abroad.

It was a smashing success.

Tokyo should be your next family vacation destination. It is an incredible city, more first world than America, and perfectly accessible for families. It is clean, organized, efficient while crowded, and easy to get around. There are a ton of things to do and see, most of them free.

In the next few posts, I intend to demonstrate how to take your two tiny kids (and more) to a foreign land and have the best vacation of your life.



Step one: Find someone who already knows all about your destination, preferably someone who lives there and is an expat. Ask them exactly what is worth doing. Do everything they say. This is best accomplished through Facebook and emails. Thank you, Tony C. If not for you, we'd never have found the Tsujiki Fish Market, open at 5 am.

These three pictures are in the huge working fish market. We were the only people with kids there, but nobody ran us down in their little carts. The bottom picture is Ahi Tuna, right before it was auctioned off. Big, huh? High Mercury content.

Step two: Plan every day in advance, plan two activities per day with an extreme midday nap, even if your kids are on completely different schedules. This results in basically two full days made out of one. Exhausting, but not if you're going to bed at 6:30 because your family never adjusts to the time change.


Our first morning was the Tsujiki fish market, and then we tried to go to the Imperial Palace, but it was closed. That afternoon, we went to Ginza which is the main shopping district.








This is a little Shinto Shrine we found wandering around near our hotel. Note the change in outfits, this is the same day but post naps.





This is Ginza, the shopping district. Notice how there's no garbage or debris, despite how bustling the city can be.

Step three: Make sure you have the appropriate carriers for children. We brought our single stroller and used the bottom storage section as a day pack. Dx carried the baby backpack. I felt like a big hippie the whole time, especially because everyone in Tokyo is dressed for work and we were in travel mode, but both kids were able to fall asleep on Dx's back. As for the stroller, there were elevators MOST of the time. Some times we had to two-person carry the stroller up and down stairs.

This is typical Tokyo, at least where we were staying. Completely clean, blue skies, towering sky scrapers, and something more efficient than I'd ever seen in America: ramp stairs.

Jude was happy as a clam in the carrier. You should have seen the back of Dx's neck at the end of the day. It was covered in food. Oh, and Jude Jude learned to spit on him during the trip.

Step four: The trip is about the kids. This was our first big trip as a family, so our priorities necessarily had to shift. We went places that they could enjoy and skipped places that we'd might have wanted to see. If they weren't welcome, we didn't want to go. This means, no shows, no intimate dinners, no museums. Our goal was sightseeing, eating delicious food and finding at least one kid activity a day. Everybody was happy, despite being together 24 hours a day. We found that if we just kept moving, there was so much to see that there weren't very many breakdowns. Mimi, 2, is a great traveling age because she's impressed by trains and transportation and she's easy to distract with small games and food.

Pipe cleaners. Easy to carry, fun to make into whatever you need to keep the two-year-old entertained. She often boarded trains wearing her special glasses, and the Japanese people just loved her. Especially when she would say "Arigato!"

We happened upon this rooftop play area above a shopping mall in Ginza. The kids had a ball.

Stay tuned for more tips on traveling abroad with little people. I'm no expert, but I was once intimidated by big trips and now, having had such success, I want others to go do the same.