Tokyo was never going to be a work trip. The goal was to come and just exist in the city first. So I gave it eight slow days, the traveller’s way and not the tourist’s, and the city spent them swapping my suitcase with a stranger’s, giving me snake sake shots in a tiny Golden Gai bar, and making me miss the last train twice. Happy accidents, every single one of them.
So this is the Tokyo edition of Let’s Goto X, told the way it actually happened: day by day. If you are planning your own Tokyo run, this one is for you. Or you just want to slow down. You want to travel a city properly instead of speed-running its landmarks. This one is for you.
Tokyo at a glance
- Trip: 8 slow days, December 2023, just the right cold and chilly out there.
- Base: One hostel in Asakusa the whole time, day trips out from there.
- Total spend: Check below for the final round-up!
- Best time to go: late November to early December for golden ginkgo and winter illuminations, or late March for cherry blossoms
- Visa: Japan e-visa for Indian passport holders, applied online, about a week to process
- Connectivity: a PASMO card for the trains and a travel eSIM for data
Day 1: I landed and had already lost my suitcase by lunch.
Asakusa, you had me at first.
The flight set the tone. ANA Dreamliner, a free middle seat, and an Asian Vegetarian Meal. 10 hours of travel later, I landed at Haneda, picked up a PASMO card and a SIM, and navigated the subway to my Asakusa hostel flawlessly. I was very pleased with myself. Conquering the rail network in Tokyo, without any nervous glances, and after reading about 30 different posts. DONE.
I was walking around with my tightly packed suitcase, which felt surprisingly light. Hauling it up and down the subway stairs felt effortless. I finally reached my hostel in Asakusa, 90 minutes from the airport. Blissfully unaware of what’s to come next.
As I opened “my” suitcase, I couldn’t figure out for the first 5 minutes why the items inside weren’t mine. The bag that I newly bought was definitely mine. Blue suitcase, with orange wheels and pockets on the outside. Then, why the items inside weren’t mine?
I accidentally picked up someone else’s suitcase.
The one time I travelled with a fresh bag with no stickers or markings is, of course, the day I grabbed an identical stranger’s off the Haneda belt. Cue panic-dialling every ANA number I could find until Yuka picked up and calmly talked me through it: bring the swapped bag back to Haneda, my own bag had not even cleared customs yet; once it did, they would ship the stranger’s bag onward through Yamato Transport. And please get back within 24 hours, so they would not have to report me to the police. Threat received, in the most polite way possible.
I rushed back to Haneda with the swapped bag, a route I now know by heart. The damage was 2,090 yen, about 1,170 INR back in December 2023. But what is 2,090 yen against a life lesson? Here is the whole saga, start to finish.
The Great Haneda Luggage Swap: wrong bag, customs twice, 2,090 yen, reunited by sundown.
Lesson learned: always check it is actually your bag coming off the belt.
Why I chose to stay in Asakusa
I based myself in Asakusa, and it was the right call: cheaper than Shinjuku or Shibuya. Full of old-Tokyo character. A straight metro ride to everywhere. Quieter in the night away from the hustle of the city. By day, it had rickshaws and tour groups around Senso-ji. But come back at 11 PM and the temple is yours, lanterns lit, no queues, golden ginkgo on the ground. I am a cloud guy, and the stormy sky that evening made it look like the setting for an epic battle.
People always ask who takes my photos when I travel solo. The answer is strangers, and there is a method: pick the shot you want, work out the angle, then pick the right person to ask. My favourite of the whole trip happened on the Sumida riverbank at 10 PM, taken by a man who was out fishing (catch and release) with Skytree glowing behind me. Tokyo keeps handing you moments like that.
Day 2: A walking tour, seven strangers, and the best night of the trip
Electric Town, powered by anime and autumn leaves.
Day 2 started with hot 7-Eleven snacks and a free walking tour of Akihabara, which I booked. Maki, our incredibly sweet guide, walked us through the game cafes, anime billboards, and maid cafes.
Two streets over is Kanda Myojin, the shrine Tokyo’s IT crowd visits for luck. I loved the small details: you rinse your hands and lips with a ladle but never touch the pool twice, the same logic as the water in a Gurudwara back home, and people literally bring new cars here to be blessed with holy water.
Then dusk hit Ameyoko market, my favourite hour, and the night turned into a story. A few of us broke off from the tour, grabbed takoyaki, and never split up again: Lara (Argentina), Karishma (London), Issey (Japan), Gabriel (US), the other Gabriel (Brazil or Chile, we never settled which), someone from Israel, and me.
From Ameyoko we moved to a Korean BBQ, where half the restaurant watched us and the other half wondered when we would leave (we cared about neither). Then Issey marched everyone to a karaoke box, where I had the best karaoke of my life: belting Queen, 14 floors up.
By the end, my throat was dead, my legs hurt, and it was the best night I had in Japan, full stop. I love this part of traveling: strangers you meet on a Tuesday who feel like old friends by midnight. Here is the entire day, market to last song.
Day 2, exactly as it happened: one walking tour, seven strangers, and the best night of the trip.
Day 3: A curated day from my friend, Mr. Flynn
Day 3 started late, thanks to the karaoke and the long walk home. My friend Flynn (and his cat) had built me an itinerary with a single rule: no landmarks.
First on his list was a covered shopping arcade in Musashi-Koyama that ran as far as the eye could see, with zero tourists. Sensory overload, the good kind. Japan still goes hard on DVDs and Pokemon cards, and a claw machine ate my money before, plot twist, actually giving something back. One of the few I have ever beaten. The universe has a way of working these things out for me.
The sun set at 4:30 pm. I caught a marvellous slice of it between the shopfronts, then went right back to the shopping.
Next was my first onsen, a communal hot-spring bathhouse where you bathe naked and the etiquette is non-negotiable. Walking through those curtains was, briefly, traumatic, until it was not. A staff member talked me through the rules, I took the sauna and the hot spring, and came out a convert.
Flynn’s itinerary ended at a hole-in-the-wall counter doing vegetarian miso ramen with shitake, cabbage, fried onion, and burnt garlic, served with cold oolong. Two regulars there had trekked in Nepal and wanted to talk about India all night. Best meal of the trip, concluding a long day of shopping.
Day 4: I missed the last train and a snake in the bottle.
Sleepless nights of Shinjuku.
A couple of friends I had met at the hostel made our way to Shinjuku that night.
Day 4 is when Tokyo’s last-train problem caught me out for the first time. We started in Kabukicho under the neon, then ducked into Golden Gai: more than 200 tiny izakayas crammed into six narrow alleys, each bar sitting maybe six to eight people.
We landed at one advertising “No Tax, No Charge, All Drink 500 yen,” about 280 INR a pour, and fell in with a group of lodgers and data scientists. Thanks to Keeley for the photo after the place shut down. Beers came out, the conversation never stopped, and the bar’s tiny TV played the climax of Shawshank Redemption dubbed in Japanese for a solid 30 minutes. Great experience. 11/10.
At Bar 3, the stakes went up: the group ordered shots of Habushu to drown some recent breakups, and I happily joined in. Habushu is an Okinawan awamori liqueur named after the venomous Habu snake. So yes, that was the snake shot. It was a spicy snake. But when in Rome. The night got away from me after that.
Guinness, gin and tonics, more karaoke, and somewhere in there, the last train left without me. So I did the only sensible thing, true to the local youth: stayed out the entire night, ate a shawarma at some ungodly hour, watched the sky take its first light, and caught the opening metro back to Asakusa at dawn. Here is the night, snake and all.
Day 4 in Golden Gai: 200 tiny bars, new friends, and the habu snake-sake shot. Missed the last train, stayed out till the first one.
Day 5: Ginza, Shopping day, Shake Shack, and the long walk home
It’s giving main character vibes.
Day 5 was shopping day, and it opened with the most Japanese thing that happened to me.
My PASMO wouldn’t recharge. I pressed the help button on the machine, thinking I might get a customer care representative on the line from the machine. And instead, a station attendant popped out of a hidden window built into the machine wall like a polite jack-in-the-box, fixed it in twenty seconds, bowed, and vanished. God, I love Japan. What an incredible experience.
Ginza is the high street of Tokyo, and on weekends, they close Chuo-dori to cars so the whole boulevard becomes a catwalk.
Even the pets dress up for it, trotting down the middle of the road like they own the block.
My first stop was the Uniqlo flagship store in Ginza. Over 12 floors of everything Uniqlo has to offer. And there I found a signature item: a tan-brown, perfectly fitting casual overcoat. I had been hunting for a long coat for years. This one felt like the one. I felt confident and walked out 21,000 yen lighter with a 10% instant tax refund on my passport (anything over 10,000 yen qualifies). Two years and many trips later, the coat is a staple in my wardrobe, worn in and out of more journeys than I can count. You can trust Uniqlo for the quality. I felt so good in it that I got a stranger to click this incredible walking shot right when the sunset was happening. Ginza was so good-looking.
A hidden shop nearby sold hand-carved Japanese seals and calligraphy. Then Cartier and the department stores lit up for Christmas, a Shake Shack to honour travel tradition, and yes, more Don Quijote (I would drop over 50,000 yen there across the trip).
Uniqlo Ginza flagship throws in a free printed photo card if you spend 10,000 yen or more.
This incredible memory is now on my fridge, taking its place among the best souvenirs ever from a trip.
Sunset till sunrise in the land of the rising sun.
That night I took a walking tour of Shibuya. The Scramble was doing its thing (the busiest pedestrian crossing on earth, a thousand people on every green light), a quick nod to the Hachiko statue where Tokyo has met up since 1934, up to the Miyashita Park rooftop sky garden, through an international food alley, and then the strangest stop of the trip: a bar built like a gothic church, glowing cross, nuns for servers.
Tokyo does not do anything by halves.
And then I missed the last train. Again. This time, I did not wait it out; I walked a long, quiet route through empty Akihabara and Asakusa with the shutters down and the neon humming to nobody. Getting the timing wrong turned into my favorite version of the city, the one nobody photographs.
Days 6 to 8: the side dish, an incredible talk, then home
Innovation happens here. The t-shirt said so.
The side dish, and what a dish it was. Open Source Summit Japan ran from December 4 to 6 out at Ariake (I took a Go Cab to get there, which is basically Uber with metered fares and a far nicer car). I had an early talk on balena’s hardware-in-the-loop test rig, how we run real device tests through Jenkins on a board farm, and it landed in a full room.
Giving it after a week of properly living in the city, rather than flying in jet-lagged the night before, made it the best talk I have given.
The talks are never the real event, though. The hallway track is: “we-pulling” in sessions, getting Adam to try proper Indian food and watching him love the spice, talking Yocto Project contributions for next year, and just missing a selfie with Linus Torvalds.
I also found a sake called the Drunken Whale, which, if you know balena’s logo, had to come home with me.
teamLab Planets: the museum you wade into
I booked one conference evening off for the one ticket worth queuing for: teamLab Planets in Toyosu, a digital-art museum where the artwork is rooms you walk into. You go barefoot and wade through ankle-deep water from space to space, the Infinite Crystal Universe, the balloon room, the Floating Flower Garden with thousands of live orchids rising around you.
Some rooms look like what happens when engineers get an unlimited RGB budget. Spectacular regardless, and no photo does it justice.
On the way out, I checked in the right suitcase this time (no mix-ups), grabbed an airport shower and an ice cream, and boarded. At the gate, I realised I had left my earphones at the hotel in the morning rush, which felt about right: I get a little sloppier the more I travel, and I have made my peace with it.
Arigato Japan, hasta luego, auf Wiedersehen.
What 8 days in Tokyo actually cost
Here are the real figures, straight off my card statements, no rounding to make myself look frugal. The exchange rate at the time was roughly 100 yen to 56 INR. The big surprise is not flights. It is how much food and shopping quietly add up in a city this good at separating you from your money (see: Don Quijote, three times).
Apps to download before you go
- Google Maps: still the best for Tokyo’s trains, with exact platforms, car numbers and which exit to take. Stations have dozens of exits and the wrong one costs you 15 minutes.
- PASMO or Suica: tap-to-ride for the entire transit network plus convenience stores. Just watch the last-train time, which I clearly never did.
- Google Translate: the camera mode that reads menus and signs in real time is the difference between ordering ramen and ordering a mystery.
- Google Lens or HappyCow: for hunting the rare vegetarian-friendly counter in a very meat-and-fish city.
Final thoughts
I came to wander Tokyo slowly. While there, I gave a talk. I left with a swapped suitcase and a karaoke-wrecked voice. I also had a snake-sake hangover and a bottle of whale sake. I missed two last trains and had a phone full of strangers who became friends. Tokyo gives you exactly as much as you are willing to wander into.
If you have any reason to fly somewhere far away, a conference, a wedding, anything, this is your sign to stop speed-running cities and give one a proper week instead. The flight is the expensive part anyway. If you want the longer version of this idea, my 30 days across Spain is the same philosophy taken to its limit.
That’s it from Tokyo. I post the unfiltered travel version of all of this over at @vipulgupta.travel on Instagram, so come say hi.
Till then, live in the mix!