Tokyo, Japan (October, 2014)

We arrived in Tokyo (Haneda airport) just after 8pm and immediately headed to our hotel.  We had booked the Intercontinental Tokyo The Strings using a free Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG) certificate that we got for paying the $49 annual fee on Eliza's Chase IHG Mastercard.  The Intercontinental Tokyo would normally cost 50,000 IHG points/night or around $375/night.  We were happy to put the free night to good use since it expired in January, 2015 and the Intercontinental Tokyo is one of the most aspirational hotels in the IHG portfolio.

Even though it was late, we wanted to walk around after we arrived, so we made our way out of the hotel.  It was adjacent to a train station and a very clean city hub with some cool looking streets.  We ate at Wired Cafe which had a whole bunch of "fusion" dishes blending Asian with other types of food.  We ordered some Nachos for an appetizer and they were served with a terrific sour cream sauce that was full of dill pickle flavor.  We loved it.  Liking the dill flavor of the "mexican" food, Cody got the Ham and Cheese burritos while Eliza got a Japanese curry.

We checked out of the Intercontinental after sleeping in and took the train to where we would spend our second and third nights in Tokyo, the Park Hyatt Tokyo, which we booked using 2 free Hyatt night certificates that we got for signing Eliza up for the Chase Hyatt Visa.  The Park Hyatt would normally cost 30,000 Hyatt Gold Passport points/night or around $585/night.  We were happy to put these 2 free nights to good use since they expired in February, 2015 and the Park Hyatt Tokyo is one of the most aspirational hotels in the Hyatt portfolio.

The Park Hyatt is near the Shinjuku train station, which has a lot of things going on nearby.  We wandered around the area in the afternoon and even got to try the Kuro burgers that they have at Burger King (black hamburgers with black cheese and black sauce).

At night, we went to the Robot Restaurant at night.  The show was crazy.  There were robots dancing and fighting along with dragons; girls dressed up in Anime; fighting panda bears, sharks, snakes, tigers, and spiders; and all kinds of other weird stuff.  The rooms were full of lasers, strobe lights, mirrors, smoke, and all kinds of bright colors. This was definitely one of the strangest experiences either of us had ever had.

We woke up the next day and caught a bus out to Mount Fuji and the Fuji-Q thrill park that is located at the base of the mountains.  The area is beautiful, green, hilly, and full of fresh air.  We were some of the only tourists in the park and enjoyed the thrill rides.  We weren't impressed with the lack of efficiency of moving people through the lines (I guess we're used to Disneyland), as lines that should have taken less than 30 minutes were taking more than an hour to get through.

We were sad that we didn't get to go to a Sumo wrestling match (we missed the Sumo tournament by a few weeks) and when we tried to book a Samurai sword fighting class, it was full...maybe next time.  The next day we were off to Singapore to finish off our trip.  We were flying out of Narita, so we had to catch a 2 hour bus ride to the airport from the Park Hyatt.