Ice Cream Asian Style – Back to Japan Day 1

What do you do when you get back to your hotel after a long day of traveling with a little snack of ice cream, and you don’t have a spoon to eat it with? Well, all of my years of camping in Colorado has taught me one thing. You adapt and conquer. You go through all of the stuff that you collected throughout the day of travel and find something that will work for you.

Yesterday was one of those crazy travel days that always kept me going, but I knew in the end it would be worth it. I would be traveling to Japan to search for the cherry blossoms that everybody talks about. They are supposed to be one of the things that everybody must see in their lifetime. It makes it on all of the travel bucket lists, and they are supposed to poke out starting this week. So I took the recent Spring Break opportunity to hop over the Sea of Japan to go and see them. The day started out early at Incheon International Airport, and I thought that I had planned correctly, nobody would schedule a flight that early. Boy, I was wrong. Many people must be on Spring Break right now and looking to find their own adventure in East Asia.

My goal for the day was to eventually make it to the Japanese mountain town of Nikko. It is a two hour train ride outside of Tokyo, and is one of the hidden gems of Japan. It is filled with old temples, and great Japanese architecture, and you do not have to compete with the crowds that you would find in the busy Japanese cities. It doesn’t have the cherry blossoms that Tokyo is famous for, but I have a whole week to see them, and this would be the perfect to ease into the week. The only problem was in order to get there I would have to hop off the plane, get on a subway, and then a train, and then a smaller commuter train if I wanted to make it there in time for dinner. It meant to keep going all day long.

Because of the busyness of the Spring Break, the time that I thought would have to sit down for a quick bite to eat was taken away from me by standing in airport lines, and figuring out how to book the trains that I needed to make it to my destination. The only thing I could get to eat along the way came from a convenience store in the Tokyo airport. Luckily, I was in Japan. Even if you buy a couple of rice triangles to eat, the person behind the counter will stuff your bag with napkins, chopsticks, and salt and pepper. I didn’t know it at the time, but this little gift would become important later on.

So it came back to my original question. How do you eat your ice cream when you do not have a spoon? Well, you adapt and conquer. You go through all of the things that you collected through the day to see what might work as a substitute. When you find it, you eat it Asian style with chopsticks. They work just as good as spoons.